As an owner of a T5 California Volkswagen van i had to make a Volkswagen van someday. This project started a few years ago with the idea to make an short wheelbase version of the Transporter van. Off course it had to be wrapped in a lot of red and white stripes otherwise it will never become an escort vehicle to guide oversized loads along the roads.
After building the front grill and door hinges on the short chassis i came across this image of a real escort van.
Regarding this image the chassis had to be enlarged to match the van from the image above. The project needed something special. Brickstuff.com was there to help out with a custom light setup for the van. At the end we installed 36 leds into the LEGO bricks. There are already 12 of them in the top light bar!
A few months and a year later i finished the structural work for the body. There still where some spots on the van which i didn't liked that much but a model always needs a few rebuilds before it is perfect. The van got his first public show at an European Modelshow located in Ede, The Netherlands. At that moment the van wasn't finished yet and desperately needed some stickers, but despite that the van took a lot of attention by the visitors. Maybe it was just the yellow color or the whole van itself, maybe both!
The Modelshow gave me the last inspiration to finish this model. I added PowerFunction motors to let it drive and steer. The whole back of the van is filled with technical stuff like battery packs, motors, gears and a few miles of wires and control boards to control al the LEDs!
There are lights like low beam lights, sidelights, fog lights, taillights and emergency lights. There are 12 LEDs located inside the lightbar on the roof, 8 LEDs in the front grill and 2 on the rear roof. All LEDs are flashing like the real van.
The second-to-last step was to create an matrix sign on the top of the roof. This roof can fold up so a matrix sign get exposed for upcoming traffic from behind. And last but not least I designed all the stickers for the van. Including a sticker for the dashboard and the license plates are copied from the real van.
More pictures of the building process can be found at my Flickr
There are plans to create building instructions for this fantastic van. But give me some time for that.
A video will be released soon.
