Pioneer Wagenwerks

05/11/2025

Happy Mother’s Day Kate! Ax and I love you.
Sure is fun Catching spring chinook on Mother’s Day thru all these years! Makes our little bay in wind river quite special! Axil is very lucky to have you as his mother!

03/29/2025

03/03/2025

We are working on a incredibly special car right now.
This is a Pinin Farina built lancia and called a Lancia PF200. It is a concept car built and shown in the 1953 paris auto show. Has been in the same family since then. Has spent most of its life in the Bay Area and only has 28,872 kilometers on it.
It has been painted a few times among a few other changes. It is a big honor to be doing this conservation of Italian history!

03/02/2025

When you are headed down the road of life and you all of a sudden want to live in a van down by the river!

02/27/2025

Here we have designed a replacement for the early style direct/reverse clutch assembly piston.
This was fun to machine and was a challenge finding the right tool and tool paths … and then not breaking it.
These parts are headed to German transaxle if you want to buy one, they will be in stock in a few days! The original part number is 010 323 121.

12/20/2024

Today the low gear housings are headed out to to be on their shelf for sale .German transaxle in Oregon has them already and have been building with them.
Like our gear carriers we plan on them staying in stock and always on a shelf if someone needs one.
There will be some options coming down the line but right now this will bolt on without any modification to a stock transaxle with some upgrades over original.
Now that these are done we will write up a “how to” post on how we recommend putting one together.
We have had a handful on the road in customer projects and have changed the front main bearing oiling and the mounts. With these done we can take what we have learned and apply it to the TDI installations we have done. We don’t do as many for other people but are going to supply high quality parts for others to use , starting with the hard parts like oil pan and engine mount kit, ( we already have but will get more in stock) also our water to air intercooler that we have had excellent experience with on our own builds. We have for years been hand building TDI vanagons and know the parts that are easy and the parts that are hard to come up with. Our solution has been….learn the CNC machining world and manufacture!
Have a great weekend!

10/17/2024

10/17/2024

10/09/2024

This 094 main bearing retaining plate has a bit of work to it for such a small part. 4140 steel ,cut out with water jet, milled, heat treated, Rockwell test then ground to dimension. Designed to fit our gear carriers and some original carriers. Another plate will be coming down the line for two wheel drive once we are on our 094five speed housings. This plate is as thick as the original plate for the reverse idler shaft on two wheel drive transaxles on the top. We ground to the same dimensions as custom plate because that has been what we used in our builds and it makes sense to us.

10/07/2024

Here we have another one of those paint jobs!
This was painted in a custom brass metallic pearl that our client picked out of our paint chips and we mixed it up and it turned our very nice. The L model style two tone paint has the original LP7Y Flash silver on the bottom and Glasurit rocker Gaurd clear on the lower panels. This was a fun job on a very well maintained van with an awesome long time customer who has a great VW collection, (this is the second car we have done for him) we really enjoy helping keep his van on the road and looking great hauling sea Kayak’s and watching birds all over the world!

10/04/2024

We have set up to anodize the parts that we machine and fabricate. It has been a learning curve that has been enjoyable and rewarding. We are in the machining mode and have the low gear housing being put on shelves at and German transaxle in Bend. Next week! I was wanting to add corrosion resistance to our transaxle parts and had pictured the original gold chromate. So I took a shot at a very light gold anodizing and it turned out like a beautiful gold anodized fishing reel which we love... bores will be cut after anodizing at this point. However first is to have them on the shelves to be used. We will tame down the bright gold and probably offer custom colors but that will be determined down the road. We are going through a long list of parts to be made starting with TDI conversion parts that have always been made manually and with outsourced waterjet /plasma cutting.
Water to air intercoolers , 50° oil pan, engine mounts and so many cool things. The we are working on is coming into the painting phase and then we are mainly going to be machining and restoring our own projects. We have had years worth of customer restoration that preceded the in house machining, we have used the machining to add to our engine machining tools to accommodate our builds and keep a few things in stock mainly the gear carrier we make.
I’m sure the three of us …Kate Axil And Matt could write a adventure novel but that would get in the way of this building of parts deal!