2011 will be a huge year for vanning.

2011 will be rather significant for vanning. Both the Econoline and the Corvan will be celebrating 50 year anniversaries. Ford is producing a limited edition 50th Anniversary XLT. I've heard they are doing 100 of them. The emblems have just come out and one of my extremely good vanning buddies sent me one. You can order them on Ebay or get them direct from your Ford dealer a bit cheaper using part BC2Z-1642528-A.

This year at SEMA there were a few vans in attendance. One that is quite familiar to many online hot rod lovers being the Notstockphotography.com Corvair Boogie Van. John has been all over the place with the van this year taking some of the most amazing shots as he goes. Another van there we first heard Bob Ryder mention a while back in Truckin', Octopus' Garden a Mid Dodge. There was also an A-Team replica van there and a couple of others. Through Facebook today I found out that Octopus' Garden will be joining Coby's Vango Econoline at the Grand National Roadster Show. This is incredible news that I would never have foreseen a few years ago. Having hot rod builders building custom vans to this level is amazing. It's looking good to have both of these vans for the CofC van show in Buena Park Ca. Feb 19th. The interest in the show is picking up, I'm putting together a package for the media to give them a good idea of what we've been doing in vanning when the spot light was not quite as bright.

Stardreamer will be at the World of Wheels/Autorama finals in Houston over Thanksgiving weekend. If your in the area please stop by and say hi to Dave and his family.

There are still 2011 Showvans calendars available and there will be some on hand at the CofC in Buena Park Ca. Feb 18-20 2011.

It never slows down, calendar done, now onto 2011

Last weekend I made a whirlwind trip to pickup the 2011 Showvans calendars direct from the printer's in Connecticut. Pat and I loaded them into my van, processed them at his place Friday and Saturday morning then mailed them out with help from his brother Terry. Huge thanks to Pat and Alaine for their hospitality !

The timing was quite good for this as I was able to attend the Getaway Halloween party as well. Never one to miss killing a number of birds with one stone we also made a side trip to Frank and Karen's to see his Project #9 and his rather famous garage. Here's Frank perusing the latest Truckin' Magazine Issue 13, some details on project #9 in with the Nats coverage. 

Frank is actually doing some welding here, not just posing. He made some good progress on the van in the past week even since we were there.

It's great to see project vans like this happening right across the U.S. Coby's wrapping up VANGO in California and Mike is just about done his Econo in the Midwest. All 3 of these vans have unique features that have never been used on custom vans previously. 

Now that the calendar is pretty much a done deal it's time to get serious about the 2011 Vanarama show season and the 2011 CofC van show.  It has been very hard to get people to commit to anything lately but hopefully now that we're getting closer to the actual events we'll get some answers. The Econoheads are busy behind the scenes getting stuff ready for the 50th Anniversary of the Econo. Some very good stuff happening with regards to this. I'll hopefully share some of this in my next post. The future is so bright right we gotta wear shades :)

Alaine and Pat at Getaway's Halloween Party, great hosts and they can rock too :)