Home Built
So after some outside modifications came the interior, in the front an imitation brick wall with a rosewood door to the bedroom and a home stereo system with a record player an oak parquet floor, wet bar with a sink and fridge and the entire front was covered in brown teddy bear fur! Then the back, no windows and a side to side 6' long bed with the walls and ceiling covered in gold velour.... oh boy today we would look at that and think what the hell was he thinking but back then it was a lady catcher. The back actually was very simple compared to the front. And the owner said it was good, but not good enough as time will tell. By chance the owner joined a local van club which if any of you are old enough to remember there were at least 3 or 4 in every town that had a van. One day the club went to a custom car show at the LA Convention Center and lo and behold Custom Vans were everywhere. One in particular caught the owner of our Chevy Vans attention “Rainbow Rider” and he said to his fellow van club members “Hey I could build something that good” of course everyone in the club said “yeah right you”…….. Well that's all our van owner had to hear, and since he had just been promoted to shop manager at a custom van shop that was a dangerous thing to say. That is such can be dangerous if custom vans are your true interest AND LOVE. Dangerous to your pocket book. And dangerous to your van. So out with the old interior and start all over again except this time no limit on expense so anything was possible.
Swinger Van's Days
Like a tornado hitting it there was nothing left of it inside or out, "TOTO I DON'T THINK WE ARE IN KANSAS ANYMORE", nothing of the old interior was saved this was going to be a completely different beast, this time it was going to resemble an aircraft interior complete with two brushed aluminum bulkhead walls with elliptical passages ways to separate the cockpit from the middle section which would be the entertainment and passenger section and would have a built in home stereo center complete with quadraphonic reel to reel and a turntable and a tv built in to the wall, the other wall would separate the bedroom from the middle and each section had a door that would slide on a tract built into the wall and be powered by an electric motor so the doors would operate similar to the doors on the old TV Show "Star Trek". Ok but before all of that could be attempted the outside had to be done. This involved steel fabrication of a front spoiler then blended into wheel well flares that blended into rear wheel well flares then tapered back into the body, next came the steel sun visor, then the modification of all the doors. This included a gull wing side door instead of the factory slider, splitting the rear door into a 'T" section similar to today's Chevy Astro Van but this was done back in 82 before Chevy even thought of it, then the front doors were split in to two pieces so the bottom section would open normally and the top would open as a gull wing.
Steel Flares
Here you can see the early stages of the exterior modifications, keep in mind that all the fiberglass add-ons are gone and all of the work you see in progress is being fabricated in steel and welded right to the van using a tubular steel skeletal structure and 22 gauge steel on top then coating with a thin layer of plastic filler. This was a radical departure from the vans the shop was used to building and it was a learning process at the same time, this sort of work takes a special talent and an imagination to see what isn't there until you build IT there are no instruction sheets with the kit, there is no kit, this is all hand built from imagination, fortunately that is what our van owner had a lot of was imagination that is why the van shop sold so many custom interiors and because our van owner was the one coming up with those interior ideas he was made overall manager of the shop and so instead of making them from a cookie cutter design as other shops did he continued to create different interiors and now was his chance to create an exterior.