Fuel for Thought

Project Updates

I made a delivery on the Fourth of July (x-ray machine parts to a hospital) then took off a few days. Most of the time I spent finishing the new bunk, and I’ll have the full write up on that tomorrow. Today I’ll cover progress on the other issues.

Air conditioner.   The van’s air conditioner cut out the last time I was in Laredo. When the blower started working again, I thought the fan had iced up from the long drive in hot, humid weather. There were no other problems until I came back into service yesterday. Now I’m pretty sure the fan is failing. It’s the same kind of behavior the blower motor showed when my auxiliary heater stopped working this winter. It runs at highway speed when the vent helps start the motor spinning. It cuts out when I stop. Some times it will start on its own and most of the time not on its own. Time to research blower motors.

Upper pan seal leak.   This winter I saw oil leaking from somewhere on the front of the engine. One dealership said it looked like the upper pan seal was leaking. That meant $11,000 of work for a $135 job. The seal is easy enough to fix, but the whole engine and transmission has to come out. This was at the time I was replacing the transmission, and it made for a pretty big gamble. The transmission job didn’t call for pulling the engine, so I was weighing a $3500 job against an additional $11,000. Andy Bittenbinder, the Sprinter guru, helped with remote troubleshooting and suggested a second opinion since, “I am suspicious of the diagnosis.” (Forum members Piper 1 and The Enemy also helped).  I got a second opinion. The second shop cleaned up the area, and a day of driving around town didn’t show any leak, but the next day out on the road the leak returned. I decided to drag my feet and hope something else would come up to either force a major repair or point to a more definitive culprit. After a couple hours lying under the van staring at an oily mess and several thousand miles of racking my brain, I decided to put all my hope on a tube of RTV. The hypothesis was that the flanged base of the Fumoto oil change valve was too wide and not allowing the seal to seat firmly. I removed the valve, filed down the flange, and used RTV silicone sealer to really make sure oil wasn’t seeping from the gasket. It worked. Two days of sitting, 500 miles of road test, and no oil. Cost of job—half a pea-sized dab from a $6 tube of RTV.

Solar panel #3. I added a third solar panel to my array. The extra power gives me just enough power to operate the auxiliary air condition for an expediters nap in the afternoon sun--barely. The performance of the air conditioner is far from ideal, but this is as far as I’ll take the ac project. The extra solar panel will have its greatest impact on winter performance by giving me more than “just barely enough” power when the sun stays lower in the sky.

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