Zel's Fleet Blog - BX, Jag XJ-S, Sinclair C5, Mercedes 208D & 230TE, AC Model 70.

[Zelandeth]

Despite the 28C heat I was determined to get something done today.

Initially I set out to swap out the rear brake lines on the Invacar. First two unions I attempted to remove immediately rounded off. Go figure. If need be I can just swap out the whole T piece, just annoying that a two minute task became a half hour one. I decided to bail on that task as I was getting eaten alive by ants within five minutes.

So across the driveway to the van. High on my to do list was to give it an oil and filter change as that's usually number one on my task list when getting a new vehicle on fleet.

Took it out for a quick run to get the oil warmed through, well as warmed as it gets anyhow. Not entirely sure this thing has a thermostat fitted at the moment as it barely gets above the bottom mark on the gauge.

Anyhow, got the Pela out and got the oil draining (in the knowledge I'd need to empty it half way through), and set about the filter.

Cracked the nuts on the filter housing and set it draining into an oil pan.

This took a surprisingly long time. What I'd not taken into account was that in addition to a sizeable oil filter housing was that I'm pretty sure this also draining the oil cooler and the lines to it. Reckon I got a good litre and a half out of it.

Once the oil *eventually* finished draining from it, withdrawing the cover plate brings the filter out with it.

This is where I made an awful mess as there's a good half pint of oil hiding in the filter itself, waiting to splash all over the place when you remove it from the base plate. I should have remembered that from last time twelve years or so ago when I last changed the oil on a Merc T1.

New O-ring and filter onto the baseplate...

...and back in place.

Annoyed I didn't spot that it's upside down until later on. Not that it matters for any reason other than my OCD being annoyed the text is the wrong way up.

By this point the oil had finished draining from the sump, so it was a simple matter of refilling with nice fresh 10W-40 semi synthetic oil, starting up doing a leak check, level check, test drive and final top up.

Takes a bit more than your average little hatchback...

Yep...the visible contents of that one bottle are the leftovers from 10 litres.

The only other task of the day was attacking the fuel tank breather with a bit of electrical flex and compressed air in an attempt to clear it so I can get less than a litre of fuel in at a time. I *think* I was successful... we'll see next time I stop at a fuel station.

[Zelandeth]

This afternoon I did a good job of demonstrating that I'm a complete idiot.

One gremlin which the van has had since the day I got it home is that the warning light on the dash for the indicators doesn't work. Thankfully they do self-cancel pretty reliably, as the tick from the flasher unit is so quiet that once the engine is running it's essentially impossible to hear.

First port of call was of course checking the bulb in the warning light. That checked out fine.

Next step was to check the wiring to it. This required taking approximately half the cab apart. After some considerable time I figured out that I could get much better access to the back of the instrument cluster by removing the speedometer than trying to squeeze through the inch wide gap I was otherwise trying to work with. I discovered to my cost however that the edges of that cut out are *really* sharp, and now have a nasty gash on my left wrist. Thankfully I noticed it before bleeding all over everything for a change.

At this point I was able to confirm that there wasn't any power getting to the light on the dash...well, not strictly true. There was *some* power getting there...just enough to make the meter needle float slightly above zero.

At this point I spent about fifteen minutes chasing a complete red herring because I got my wires crossed. The supply line to the indicator light on the dash is blue with a red trace. Not red with a blue trace...

Eventually figuring out which wire was which, I got back on track and sure enough found that the wire from the dash did indeed terminate on the socket for the flasher unit. A terminal which is clearly intended to have 12V on it intermittently to light the warning light...which doesn't.

Just to confirm it was the same wire, I grabbed a jumper wire and hooked that pin up to 12V...

...Hey look, the light does work! (Yes, they are just that dim due to the lens being a really deep green)

Problem is with the flasher unit itself...and it's not just a dry joint, seems that we've got at the very least an open circuit diode and transistor to contend with.

Of course can I find another four pin flasher unit floating around in any of my boxes of bits? Not a chance!

Seriously...why didn't I just check that immediately after proving the bulb in the lamp worked rather than tracing a non-existent wiring fault?

Well actually the reason I was on this track is that I had a feeling that this fault might in fact be something to do with the alarm system that appears to have been installed by a drunken monkey rather than a technician. I'm getting really fed up of finding poorly routed wires that are about a foot shorter than they need to be, cable-tied to utterly inappropriate bits of the van.

I've also noted that the lens on the indicator light on the dash is sadly cracked. Don't suppose anyone has one floating around in a random box of spares somewhere do they?

[Zelandeth]

Hey look, another same day update.

I noticed on the way back from the station today that the brake pedal in the Xantia was making strange squeaking noises. I'd noticed that the ride had felt a bit jittery in the last couple of days let's take a look at the LHM tank after a bit of exercise...

Yep...we do appear to have some aeration issues...

I know a couple of the hoses have been off before and have jubilee clips on them...will swap those out for fuel hose clips and see if that sorts it.

Was just about to close the bonnet when I spotted this.

That doesn't look good...

Oh great. While I was there I also spotted an obvious leak from one of the service ports.

Guess it's time to get the system vacced down so these can be sorted out. With the prices of R134A going nuts it's going to make sense to sort this sooner than later.

[Pug_XUD_KeenAmateur]

I think you should blame the heat for the error with the Indicator Warning Feed Zel.

Hope the gashed wrist isn't proving too much of a frustration. Its not so much the cut itself is it, its the faffing about to clean it, dress it, clean the mess you've left behind and then the discomfort of 'catching it wrong' in one way or another over the course of the next week. Least there was no mess.

[Zelandeth]

Especially given I've got cream long pile carpet in the cab!

...Which needs at very least attacking with a wet and dry vacuum cleaner anyway. I reckon it will get changed at some point. Given it's glued to everything carpet will likely stay (though I'd honestly prefer the clean look of the cab with the normal rubber mats), though I think a dark grey short pile carpet like you'd normally specify for a high traffic area in a house will make more sense. Maybe a dark blue one like in the back, that would work too. Minor stuff for the wish list though, not important just now though.

What is important is time. We're taking it away for a long weekend in a couple of weeks. That means I've got a couple of weeks to get the essentials up and running again.

Bathroom is going to be the most work simply because it's in the greatest state of disarray. Oh, and has been a storage locker for months if not years.

With it emptied I was able to find that there was only a handful of insulation still missing.

I also came to the conclusion that whoever decided to start these "upgrades" failed to grasp one critical aspect of caravan and camper construction - that weight is the enemy.

They had started to lay laminate flooring in there - having laid about a third of it in the tiny room - what I pulled out must have weighed north of 10kg. Likewise the worktops are normal kitchen ones and probably weigh twice as much as they need to.

Anyhow... insulation was finished off (seriously, I'm going to be finding bits of polystyrene for months - it got EVERYWHERE!).

...and the first wall panel was put in place.

This won't take too much time to get "buttoned up" to be honest. Just cutting ply to shape and screwing it in place. By the way - I'm not hunting any potential sources of water ingress. I'm simply assuming that *every* seal on the rear of the van is in need of disassembly and a good dose of fresh sealent. Taking that approach on the whole van to be fair - but especially the rear panel as the roof pretty much entirely drains down there because of the way it slopes.

Think having seen it in the rain though I know why the heater box has rotted so badly. The water dripping off the front overhang drips *directly* into the heater vents...so it gets a bunch more than just incidental run off from the windscreen etc. Guessing this may also have something to do with the seemingly dead blower motor.

Given the trains out of London had gone to pot for the fourth time in three days I had to stop at this point to go rescue Abby from a different train station. It's funny how hard work I find driving the Lada now I've kind of got used to the lazy pace in the van. It's frenetic to drive, heavy brakes, vague steering and really short gearing... you're always busy. Also man it's noisy.

Anyhow...back to the van.

I need to get a bunch more ply before I can finish the bathroom (and find a manual for the toilet as someone has hacked the power cable off it so I need a wiring diagram), so time together something done in the kitchen.

After a couple of hours and a truly epic mess later, we have this.

It's actually starting to look more like a kitchen now. The draining board is a little squint, but I'm not worrying too much about that as long term I want to replace the worktops with something more appropriate to a motor home (i.e. much lighter!) and will concentrate on precision then.

So once I get the walls done in the bathroom I can get the wallpaper done, refit the toilet and shower tray, then start looking at getting things piped up.

[RichardW]

Fitted a few of those cassette toilets back it the early 90s when I worked with a guy that did caravan repairs. It's quite a heartstopping moment when you have to cut a big hole in the side of a nearly new van....

[Gibbo2286]

Fitted a few of those cassette toilets back it the early 90s when I worked with a guy that did caravan repairs. It's quite a heartstopping moment when you have to cut a big hole in the side of a nearly new van....

The local van centre had a new boy start, he was given the job of plywood lining a new van, imagine the look on the boss's face when he found the lad had drilled and fixed all the plywood from the inside with self tappers poking out all along the body.

[Zelandeth]

Fitted a few of those cassette toilets back it the early 90s when I worked with a guy that did caravan repairs. It's quite a heartstopping moment when you have to cut a big hole in the side of a nearly new van....

The local van centre had a new boy start, he was given the job of plywood lining a new van, imagine the look on the boss's face when he found the lad had drilled and fixed all the plywood from the inside with self tappers poking out all along the body.

Oops! Note that I made very, very, very sure that the screws I was using were shorter than the battens I was screwing them into were thick...

Thankfully I've already got the access door for the toilet in place so I don't need to got cutting holes in anything. Though I do need to figure out where the heck the power line for it has been buried. A manual wouldn't hurt either...Have four wires. Brown, blue, black and black with a white trace...but haven't found a bit of the existing harness for them to connect to. Yet. There's a massive bundle tied up under the floor there so it may well be in that lot.

The only thing I actually got done today was starting to get some rustproofing applied in general to the underside of the van. It's not a good job and will need to be redone at some point, but it should at least help slow the decay in the short term.

Mostly was working on the underside of the cab as that's the crusty bit really, the rest is actually in surprisingly good nick to be honest.

That exhaust is needlessly complicated though, and I suspect will be getting significantly simplified when it gets replaced - will need to get some advice from some experts in that field methinks. Probably sooner rather than later as the expansion box has snapped off its bracket which means that it buzzes and rattles maddeningly at idle. The shorter I can get it the better I reckon, not least from the perspective of weight saving. I don't even want to know what that main silencer weighs.

[Zelandeth]

So... having spent the entire morning dangling off the top of a ladder installing window openers on the skylights up here...

...Working mostly by Braille as I was looking straight into the sun for most of the time. Oh, and have I mentioned that I am Uncomfortable with Heights. Suffice to say I was knackered.

So when faced with a substantial to do list covering four cars...I did the only logical thing: Went and fixed something utterly trivial that hadn't even made it onto the official list yet.

Two new bulbs got the courtesy light in the cab working. Priorities!

It was bugging me, okay?

In the evening I had a spare hour, so went back and attacked the actual to do list.

First on today's list: the three dimensional jigsaw that was the toilet. I knew it was a Thetford Cassette unit...but beyond "old" I was lacking in further identification...and nowhere on any component is there an obvious model number. So getting an actual manual wasn't going to happen. I did find one that was reasonably close though, which initially raised more questions than it answered - though one of the *except in this case... paragraphs revealed that the tank for flush water tank wouldn't be there in cases where it had been specified to connect to the water supply in the van. That explained why it didn't match any diagram I could find, and what the random hose was for.

What did take nearly half an hour of swearing though was figuring out that whoever had taken things apart had somehow managed to rotate the baseplate by 180 degrees. Now, it *nearly* fits together backwards...but not quite. The fact that the room is only about 5mm wider than the appliance I was working on was unhelpful there. It must have taken me nearly ten minutes of wrestling with the darn thing to turn it around even once I worked that out.

Still, it slotted together quite nicely after a few minutes once I worked that out. So should just be a simple matter of reconnecting power and water supply to it once it's fixed back in place. Which will follow obviously once the wall itself is sorted.

Having turned one thing from a pile of bits back into a complete appliance, I decided to see if I could make any sense of the rat's nest surrounding the mains power inlet.

As with everything it seemed, everything had just been unceremoniously yanked out of the distribution board. Didn't take long to make sense of the mess though, and within ten minutes had got the supply for the mains socket and the supply for the mains backed DC supply/battery charger hooked back up. There are two further mains circuits, will be for the fridge and mains pump for the toilet I have to assume (can't see what else would need mains), those have been left disconnected (but now labelled!) as the tails are still just tied up under the floor.

I should now (once I track down a hookup cable anyway) be able to plug the van in and run stuff from the mains without draining the battery. Oh...and charge said battery without having to haul the brute of a thing out of the van. I think it's possible to charge the vehicle battery the same way too should it be necessary as well. At least it should now work if plugged in rather than blowing up! One more thing ticked off at least.

At the very least it should be possible to use power tools now without having to faff around with an extension cord dangling out of the window.

Really do need to get the vacuum cleaner in there tomorrow to deal with the debris from the polystyrene insulation cutting, it seriously looks like a snowman exploded in there at the moment.

[Zelandeth]

I wasn't kidding about the scale of the mess caused by cutting up the polystyrene sheets.

Luckily that was relatively easy to sort out with the vacuum cleaner. Not kidding myself though, I'll still be finding bits of the stuff for months at the very least.

Only other thing I did was to add a couple of additional status indicators to the outside of the enclosure that houses the mains electrical stuff.

Amber one will be to show that the mains input is live, red to show that the AC circuits are actually energised. I'll probably add one more to show that the output from the transformer is live too (there is actually a specific output marked "panel indicator" for that purpose. For that though I'll be using the no charge light from an old Leyland Olympian...amber and it's got a battery symbol on it...so should do nicely.

...and I enjoy using random bits of bus for utterly random purposes.

That round pin 5A socket will be going I reckon. I've no real use for it, so will replace it with something containing as many USB sockets as I can find - given that everything charges by USB these days that's likely to be far more useful.

That's about it for now. Was a friend's birthday today so didn't get much time to play with.

[Zelandeth]

I was really surprised to find these in Halfords a couple of days ago...

Seriously? The old H4 retrofit lamps for the non-halogen headlights...they can't sell many of those these days, surely?

Definitely worth it though, even the camera can see the difference in light output.

I've now picked up a mains hook up lead (and 13A adaptor) so I should be able to actually plug it in tomorrow.

I've also bought a very important upgrade for the garage: a whiteboard! So I'll have some hope in actually keeping track of my to do list...and actually maybe log services in the spreadsheet before I've long forgotten when it was done. Pretty sure my Saab got an oil change every two rather than six months more than once! Given the van takes 7.7 litres of oil I'd rather not make mistakes like that!

Saw someone passing by today in the opposite direction driving a Transit from around the same time period as my Merc, we both spotted each other and there was quite a cheery exchange of saving and flashed headlights. Always makes me happy when that happens.

I hadn't realised until this evening that Autotrail appear to have an owners club. I might need to investigate that.

The question does spring to mind on the same line of thought, is there a particular forum anywhere that's likely to be a regular haunt for Merc T1 owners? I found the Brickyard a useful information source when I had my VW T25, though they were a slightly odd bunch... don't know if there's enough of a following of these old vans for a similar place to exist. Shame really as (and I know I'm biased) I reckon they're a vastly superior vehicle that has at least as much character as any generation of VW Transporter once you get to know it.

Was out using it in "daily driver" mode again today and had my husband grinning like an idiot as a passenger just as I always am when driving.

It's interesting to note that when driving the Lada you're always scrambling to keep up. The fact that it's absurdly short geared and wayward in the handling department sees to that. The Activa does most things as if by telepathy, but it's very point to point moments of activity when needed. Driving the van though there's much more of a regular rhythm that I almost automatically seem to settle in to when on the move. Nothing ever seems rushed...despite it being on a technical level the vehicle which should be the most challenging to drive of any in the fleet, oddly I'm tending to find that it's by far the least stressful or tiring to drive.

That said...I never claimed to be normal!

[Zelandeth]

More to eliminate it as a possibility than out of actual hope of success, I decided to swing by the main Merc dealer as I was virtually driving past it anyway.

Getting anything for a near extinct 28 year old van would be a stretch I figured, but meh...worth a shot. Half expected them to treat me like an alien given I'm a scruffy sod who can't be bothered with fancy clothes.

No. They treated me like royalty from the moment I set foot in the door. Even bigger surprise, they had the parts located in seconds. Their parts lookup system is ace - and the gent on the desk knew how to use it.

They were massively apologetic that the parts would have to come over from Germany and they couldn't give them to me there and then. I couldn't quite get across to the guy that I was staggered they could even get them at all, having to wait a few days really wasn't a problem.

So the list, the little rubber boot that covers the sliding propshaft joint, a tiny little plastic bush that seats the throttle cable on the fuel pump arm, and would you believe it...a replacement lens for the indicator warning light on the dashboard?!?

Cheaper than anywhere online as well (not that I'd been able to find the lens anywhere anyway!).

I'm staggered...never expected to find anything on that list at the dealer.

Realised just as I pulled out the car park that I meant to ask about a headlight switch too as mine looks like it's been used as a chew toy. Will ask about that when I grab the last lot. Will see what they can do by way of body panels too...as that could be really helpful if they've got much...

If this is the sort of parts service that I can expect, I should have got my T1 years ago!

[Hell Razor5543]

I recall when Jeremy Clarkson got to drive a Mercedes Pagoda. He said then that it was possible to buy everything you needed to keep them on the road from Mercedes. I do not know how they do it, but Mercedes don't appear to have an expiry date for parts; it appears that, if they made the car, they will sell the parts decades after the car went out of production. They may be expensive (vehicles, that is), but that is one reason Mercedes is so successful.

[myglaren]

My wife's uncle always drove a Mercedes as he said it was cheap to run and very cheap on parts.
He had a friend with a FIAT who was paying up to 10x the cost of Mercedes parts for his heap.

[Pug_XUD_KeenAmateur]

So you've upgraded from the round 'pre-Halogen' to the H4? Are those old hat now and should I be thinking about having a couple of spares before they become hard to source?

....I'm not aware of changes to Bulb technology, but then I'm kinda old school in so many ways.

I entered a Halfrauds store and made a purchase not that long ago, a replacement Water Bottle for my push-bike. Its useless coz its too narrow for the cage. That'll teach me. Only £2 lost tho.

Are you now on the Grid?

...and is the 'To Do' list growing or getting shorter with the new Whiteboard? Lot to be said for logging jobs immediately, even if that does involve oily paperwork. I also find the 'Voice Message' function on my phone really useful for this sort of thing.

How did you go with the Autotrail OC? I had a quick google of 'Mercedes Van Owners Clubs' but only came up with the Sprinter one.... should think ther are likely to be ex T1 owners there, worth a shot.

VW Transporter.... character for sure, but aren't they rather small for a camper? [a bit of a cheek really, me 'camping' in an Estate Car].

I guess if you've got money in spades and image is important to you, then yeah, buy a Transporter, but if you want practicality for actually camping, buy a Fiat, Peugeot or Ford conversion, surely, quite possibly for a lot less money.

...saying that, how many people these days want practicality from a vehicle? Given the absurd creations out there, perhaps only a minority.