Solo Hobbit's '69 baywindow "Ozzy"

Ozzy maiden voyage low resolution.jpg (23944 bytes)

Ozzy was my first bus which I got during one of the more responsible periods of my life, freshman in college. Ozzy got its name when my friend talked me into making it into a party vehicle to travel to an Ozzy Ozborne concert. I never listened to Ozborne again but Ozzy's name stuck.

Solo Hobbit's VW busses
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	Old Busses: Ozzy Alfi Else a Westy
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Ozzy was originally all white. I painted it the tan and brown colors with alkyd oil paint, which is basically hardware store enamel. It came out not too bad, even though I used a roller and brush. My philosophy for using brush paint was 1) cheap and 2) easy to touch up scratches. I might do this again some day. Very sustainable.

Here is my old buddy Randy with Ozzy at East Fork State Park in Ohio. We all had a lot of fun in Ozzy.

I remember the accelerator pedal falling off on the cross Bronx Expressway, rebuilding the engine on the streets of Evanston IL at my brother's place, pulling the engine with only a 2 by 4 for a floor jack to replace a burned clutch, and using a $350 settlement from someone running into me to throw a party. Oh the joys and learning experience of your first bus.

Thumbnails of class project
During my sophomore year in college, my friend Tom and I talked our professor Brain into letting us paint Ozzy in the college courtyard as a some sort of expression of communication, the particular reasoning of which I do not really remember if there was a reasoning. Anyway, The idea was for the entire class to come up with a single design. Well, this kind of group effort does not go far in the ego centric mentality of architecture students, so the final design was to divide the bus up into sections and then let each member of the class paint one of the sections. My mom was very dismayed to see this after the nice paint job I had given Ozzy. Click on these thumbnails to see them full size.

After driving around with the conspicuous paint job, I took a gallon of green latex house paint to Ozzy. Here are my old buddies Alex, Tom, and I in Brooklyn.

My final learning experience with Ozzy was when returning to Ohio after a long trip. I had almost made it back when the generator froze up and the belt started to squeal real loud. Simple I though, just remove the belt and go the last few miles running the ignition off the battery. I forgot that the engine cooling fan ran on the other end of the generator shaft. Just as I made it back, the bus started to buck and white smoke started to billow out the engine vents. I would have held on to Ozzy and fixed it up, but cash was short and I had to let it go. Oh well, as my brother said "we learn by doing".