The other day my low beams took a hike, both at the same time. Not the fuses, not the bulbs, not the grounds, not the low beam relay. Power out of the relay but no power at the low beam connector at the lamp.

So what’s up?

Some background, I have two relays in the headlight system. One for the high beam one for the low beam. Here is the rough schematic of how I wired things

So out of the low beam relay on terminal 87, the current then continues on and back into the fuse panel, pin 21 in the A connector block.

See A21? Turned out this connection was the culprit. Was burned and melted. So much so that I couldn’t get the terminal out of the block to replace. What happened to cause this? I’m thinking it’s was one of those positive feedback things starting with a slightly iffy connection, a little resistance making heat which causes more resistance then more heat etc etc. Ending finally in no continuity. Could I have been over loading the connection with 80W lowbeams? The combined current draw for two 80w lamps would be around 12 amps ( at 13.5 bolts) so I’m not really convinced the terminal couldn’t take that. Edit: sounds like I’m trying to convince myself doesn’t it? Maybe it is too much current for the pin, however the  pin carrying the high beam current shows no damage at all, albeit the high beams would be in use less than the low beams. This might all be moot as I have a lower current draw lighting solution that I hope will pan out.

As I couldn’t get the terminal out of the plastic block I cut the wire ( that wire runs directly to the low beam relay) and used the really handy M terminal right close by. The M2 terminal is common to A21, you can see that on the stock wiring diagram above.

Hers the nasty connector ( I tore the plastic clip of the near side) and you see the yellow “jumper wire” to the M2 terminal. It has a bit of black heat shrink on it to give the wire a bit of stiffness, strain relief of a fashion, for the spade terminal.

I really hate working on the back of the fuse panel. And getting the plastic terminal blocks out is a bear. And I always seem to knock some other connection loose with all the tugging and twisting involved in getting the connectors out. 

I’ve been mucking around with the notion of better protection of the westy propane tank. I wanted a bit of extra cover to reduce the amount of dirt on the tank fittings and also some protection for the copper lines that lead up into the van. Here are some pics of one prototype. During the making of this one I had a better idea, so another version is in the works.

This one appears to hang lower than the stock skid plate, but in fact it sits a tad higher. I think the unpainted aluminum and the side plate gives the visual effect of sitting lower.

Oh, and I do get a lot of muck thrown up on to the side of the van. Combination of not having my mudflaps on and the 25mm offset of the rims. 

I’ll do another post on this skid plate showing it with side plate off and explaining why there is a half moon cut out on side plate.

So when I made the first Swellegant table gizmo a couple of years ago, blog post here, good friend Simon made sport of my enthusiastic review of it. Turns out he was jealous but it took him until this last summer before admitting it…ha!

Made another, slightly different than the first in some details, and gave it to him. He used it on his recent trip.

Pretty much the same idea as the original, but a little slimmer.

Clossic displacement behaviour, I should have been doing other more important things. But I’ve been sort of obsessed by what I thought was sloppy gas pedal feel. You know, the pedal moving sideways. So instead of looking at my pedal to see what’s what, I put it down to the stock design that uses thin plastic to act as a hinge. Spoiler alert, the hinge was partially broken and that caused the sloppy feel.

But I went ahead and made a couple of pedals to try out. Here they are, pretty rough but as I said I’m just trying things out. I have a spare stock pedal, shown in the pics, I could have just installed that, why didn’t I?

Yes, pretty crude but good enough to try out. I decided on the middle one, has a spring return built in. Thought it might be interesting to see how helping the throttled close will feel. As usual installing the pedal took longer than I thought. You know I have the factory rubber mat laid over the composite foam underlay that came standard with carpet but not with the rubber mat. The rubber mat therefore didn’t fit in quite as nice as it should. It was ok though, but this time when I pulled the underlay out and it broke up even more than before I decided to trash it. There was a bit of surface rust starting in the driver’s side footwell, I wire brushed that and treated it with rust converter then a couple of coats of paint.

The stock pedal was attached to the floor by a couple of pop rivets. I drilled them out and enlarged the holes to take a pair of 10-24 threaded inserts ( I don’t have any metric threaded inserts) .

Test fitting the pedal.

I agree, without that pressed foam underlay will be more road noise coming through the floor. Haven’t figured out completely what to do about that but made a start by sticking down some thin self adhesive asphalt based tape. Yup, tar based not butyl. It’s what I had on hand and I don’t think off gassing or the tape sagging during hot weather will be an issue in this location. Good god but I ramble on. 

I have to find a better route for those wires running forward. They haven’t been taped down in place when I took the pic, bout where I did tape them really wasn’t that great. You can feel them under the mat.

Mat back in, pedal installed. The top surface of the pedal is removable. I’m thinking I might make another that is slighlty wider at the top, the extra width on the brake pedal side. It feels ok underfoot and I can feel the resistance of the extra spring. I’ve yet to road test it. 

 Ok, tried it out on drive to work. Yes it feels firmer, a little more effort to depress it. But I don’t find it a probelm. But what is a problem is that it’s too narrow. It’s approximately the same width as the stock pedal. I know I must be obsessing over this but it bugs me that half my foot is hanging off the side. Do I have some sort of mental issue, i quickly made another pad to replace the narrow one.

Oh yeah, as clunky as it looks, it’s so much better. No really, it is. I mean it, I’m not kidding. It’s the best things since the last thing I thought was the best thing since…

Good friend Stephan came across a Westy owner who made a very interesting hinged cover for the luggage rack. You all know that area is a source of wind noise and some owners have put in a flat plate to reduce the turbulence caused by the front edge of the rack.  This mod is a bit different and although I’d love to meet the owner and have him argue the reason for the trailing edge design, the entire structure looks very well made.

Got a couple more pics. Yes there are latches on the front.

This post briefly outlines an experimental fix I made to my spare lifting bar assembly. At time of writing, I haven’t swapped it in to the van to give it a good testing, so the jury is still out as to whether the repair works as well as it seems to on the bench.

While I was futzing around doing this repair, Dave commented that I should design something that could be sold as a kit for the Westy owner that doesn’t have access to machine tools, welding, etc. This is a good idea, unfortunately the approach I was taking doesn’t really lend itself to that. But it did give me some hints towards a repair kit. 

I think most vanagon Westy owners know by now that eventually the pop top lifting assembly will wear out at the main hinge joint. It’s a poor design, a harsh steel on steel moving contact with no lubrication and insufficient bearing surface. Many other owners have fixed this problem by various means, welding up the worn surface is one example.

Andy, owner of the nice T3 Atlantic, “Wolfgang” (blog linked in list on right side of the page), recently had his lifting assembly re painted. It was his blog post on that and his comments to me that got me off my duff to try this fix.

I have a spare assembly, from my old 82 Westy. It’s galvanized steel, no paint like in the later Westies. The zinc coating has grown the characteristic white fuzz during storage in the barn. Here’s a pic of the hinge that is the problem.

A couple of notes on the hinge. The horizontal bar extends into the hinge through that collar ( with the screw) and near the end it get worn away. There will be a pic of that coming up. The hinge is folded up fully, as it would be when the top is down, and that steel cable you see running up over the round centre section continues down and back into the tube on the bottom where it connects to a spring. Again, more on that later. But as is, the assembly is under tension and wants to straighten out (tubes are tied together out of shot).

Remove the M5 machine screw from each end of the horizontal bar and then pull the bar out of the hinge. Are the ends of that bar worn, Or have you lived a pure life and the bar ends are sound?

One end. 

And the other end, even worse.

It’s really easy to take the assembly apart, apart from the annoying spring washers. Clip washers, starlock washers, must be other names for them too. I broke most of mine trying to remove them, but you can find new at the hardware store or auto parts place. When the hinge is relaxed, ie fully extended, and the pin that limits further extension is removed, the end of the spring cable can be detached and pulled out the bottom of the tube. Yes, the foot has been removed from the bottom of the tube. Another pin and annoying clip.

Greasy old spring and cable out.

Ok, back to the hinge. Here we have the pair and its the edges on the  “not so round anymore ” holes in the flat bar welded in the ring that wear the grooves in the cross bar. I mean really, what the heck were the engineers at Westfalia thinking?

My fix is to bush those holes to create a larger bearing surface. First I had to make the holes more or less round again. 7/8″ endmill was over sized just enough. Truth is, it didn’t complete make round one of the holes, but good enough.

Hard to see the difference, but the holes are now nominally 7/8″ diameter.

Ok, now the bushings. I had a small bit of bronze (or maybe it’s brass) salvaged marine shafting. I had fooled around making flutes on it with the index head. I was learning, wasn’t a great job, had the head offset so the grooves were asymmetric, blah, blah. But there was enough of the stuff to work with.

And alongside is the little shaft that will replace the worn end of the cross bar. I reamed the ID of the bushing to 16mm, turned the shaft slightly undersized ( about 15.95mm). The OD of the bushing was left untouched on one end, the other turned down to a press fit for the 7/8″ hole that I milled in that flat bar. 

Notice one end of the little shaft has a flat milled on it and a cross hole drilled? That end will fit into the cross bar with the hole lining up with the existing cross bar hole.

I cut off the worn end of the cross bar and milled back square. Still using the 7/8″ roughing end mill. Oh how I love that tool.

So, and excuse the initial so, so I pressed in the bronze bushings. One pressed home with that satisfying grunt that makes one smile, the other… Meh. Combination of pressing into only 1/8″ thick material and the hole not being fully round ( remember I mentioned one hole didn’t fully catch the mill?). I didn’t want the bushing to be able to rotate in the hole, it would then wear away just like the original bar. The answer? 1/8″ roll pin. Holds the bushing nicely in place. 

Beside it is the little stainless shaft that is pushed into the end of the cross bar.

Lubed the shaft up a little with some light oil and put everything back together. The M5 machine screws on the cross bar locates the stainless shaft, it doesn’t move.

Picture taking to forgotten during reassembly, all I can show you is the end of the hinge where you can see the stainless shaft and a hint of the bushing.

But trust me, the hinge action is now nice and smooth. Sometime soon I will install it and see if it lives up to the hype. And, I’ll have a look at the one currently installed in the van with an eye on making some sort of easy DIY kit or procedure.

For a few months now I’ve been using a Pioneer MHV-X560BT head unit in the van. It replaced a Pioneer DEH-P5000UB that had worked almost perfectly for 8 years. The older unit did develop a ground loop whine and I posted about that back in 2011, link here. But apart from that the unit worked well. It had USB input on back, and I led a dongle up thru the ashtray to connect to devices. Played CDs , various formats but I found myself using CDs less and less in the van.

The one thing that really bugged me about the old unit was its depth. With all the wiring coming out the back, including three pairs of RCA jacked cables, it barely fit into the dash. Fetched up hard against the heater box in back.

So back to the new unit, it has no CD player so it’s about half the depth of the old one and despite the inevitable rat’s nest of wires coming out of the back (again including three pairs of RCA jacked cables and an USB cable)  it fits delightfully easily into the van.

It has built in Bluetooth which pairs up quite quickly and consistently with my devices, external mike for hands free phone,  a remote control, wired USB input.

The controls are not bad but not great. I find them better than the old unit, especially for menu access and also for adjusting things when driving. Don’t get as many bump induced accidental choices.

Looking straight down thru ashtray hole.

Maybe this shot shows reduced depth better. Pic taken at an angle.

The old unit sitting on dash. Looks really huge now.

I stuck the mic here, not the best spot perhaps.

And same ashtray lurking dongle in case of wired USB need.

Btw, the head unit feeds an old Blaupunkt 2 channel amp mounted infront of the glovebox. One channel feeds a pair of BA crossovers that feeds tweeters behind stock grill in door, and 6.5″ units at bottom of the door. The other channel feeds a pair of 4″ speakers back on the overhead cupboard.

A few posts back I described how I installed an inexpensive diaphragm put in the van. I did it quickly, was keen to try it out on a trip. The other day I relocated it to what I think is a better spot.

I removed the in tank pump, the bilge pump type unit I was using as a stock replacement, and pulled the electrical wires out through the hr grommet at top of tank. I sealed the grommet wi a 1/4-20 stainless bolt and nut.

I shifted the little black box that is the water level indicator unit ( for the old style water level system) so that I could screw the pump to the wall between the cupboard and tank.

Electrical connection was very convenient, two wire plastic connector right there, just swapped over from the old pump.

You notice that the little wall that separates the cupboard from the wiring has been removed. I, like many other owners, removed that wall early on to gain a little bit more cupboard room. To protect the wiring from shifting cupboard contents, I screwed on a bit of the cheap carpet I’m using as cupboard bottom liner.

The pumps is a bit quieter back here. Still louder than the in tank pump, but considering the increase in flow and pressure, the additional noise is really acceptable. And for goodness sakes, just how long are you going to have the faucet turned on? 🙂

There is one, or maybe two, more things I’d like to add the the install. First one I will certainly will do, and that is add a relay back up front under the sink. You see, the eurovan faucet wiring is pretty skinny stuff. It’s not a long run from where it connects to existing wiring, but I’d rather that the switch is not handling the full 2.5 A of pump draw.

The second improvement that I probably won’t get around to but would be neat, is a little pressure tank accumulator. It’s what’s used in other RV and marine installs. Not sure if I really need it and if I am willing to devote space to it, I’ll see.

Old Simon, yes the guy who has the hi top 91 Westy and recently the syncro double cab, bought another vanagon a month or so ago. I haven’t posted about it yet, I’ve been waiting for some of the little improvements to it to be finished.

One of the improvements is better wheels to replace the stock 14″ that the van came with. Simon found four 15″ steel wheels but the dolt went ahead and had tires mounted before the centre holes were opened up. I’m still cursing him for that. Without the tires I could have mounted the rims on the big lathe and the job would have been a snap.

The original bore hole size was something around 56 mm diameter. We needed to have them opened up to at least 66.4 mm. I fussed around with making a dedicated boring tool to use in the mill, but I ended up using a roughing endmill and the big rotary table.

I should mention that I haven’t done this job before, take my technique and approach with a hefty grain of salt.

As big (and darned heavy) as the rotary table is, the tire and wheel is bigger. Wheel on the table with inside face up, and the outside face sitting on blocks on the table so that the tire is taken out of the clamping set up. Not a great shot here, but you get the idea.

Oops, I skipped a step, the rotary table has to be centred directly under the spindle of the mill. This particular table has a #4 Morse taper hole and I stuck a little lathe live centre in there and indicated off that. Ok, I have to state right now that this entire boring process does not need to have super precise set up. The wheel is lug centric, the centre hole is just a clearance hole. Still, it was worth it to go through the motions to be semi precise. I centred the table to within about 1-2 thou. Good enough.

Then the wheel is humped up onto the table, on blocks, and loosely clamped. I discovered that the collet holder bevelled end fit into the unbored wheel well enough to get a rough centre alignment.

Clamped the wheel down onto the table just lightly and then I indicated the hole, got it pretty well centered ( again, around 1-2 thou) and, as the British would say, nipped the cramps down firmly.

Ok, endmill inserted, it’s a 7/8″ HSS roughing endmill. Moved the mill table over until the cutter touched the side of the hole, set my dial on zero. Yeah, no DRO on this mill yet. I had calculated a total depth of cut of 0.217″/5.51mm on the radius. That would give a diameter increase of 11mm, making the enlarged hole nominally 67mm.

So once touched off, I cranked in a depth of cut ( that varied between 0.070″ and 0.020″, I did a finishing climb cut at the smaller value). I cranked the rotary table and the wheel rotated and the cutter cut. I have a shaky video of that.

Exciting stuff eh?

In the end, the wheels turned out pretty good. The surface finish with the roughing endmill was acceptable. How about before and after shots?

Unbored

Bored (aren’t we all?)


This was one of those jobs where the set up took far longer than the actual machining.

Bought a cheap water pump from banggood, this one. The original Westy in tank water pump had bit the dust a few years ago and I have been getting by using a small bilge pump similar to this.

It works ok I guess, had to adap the outlet to match the Westy plumbing. But it didn’t push as much water as I had hoped. For years I have been using a Eurovan Westy extendable faucet and I had dreams of being able to pull the faucet out through the sliding window and get a refreshing blast of cooling water on a hot summer day. Especially because the faucet has a spray setting. With the bilge pump, and the stock Westy pump before, the promised spray wasn’t that impressive.

I know that many sailboats and RVs use a pressurized water system with a pressure activated pump and an accumulator. Tempting to try this I thought.

So I buy the banggood pump, and arrived the other week. Supposed to produce 100 psi ( well that’s the switch cut off setting) and 4 L/m volume. I rushed out and did a quick install just to see if it will make my shower dreams come true. I simply plumbed it inline and connected its power lead to the switched side of the Eurovan faucet wiring. So the pump comes on when the faucet switch closes. Not a pressurized system and no accumulator. 

Note that I did mount the pump at a slight angle to ease stress on the tubing.  It had nothing to do with the awkward position I had to assume to get in there and screw. Nothing at all. I might find a better spot for the pump.

Does it improve things? Hell yeah. 

Shot of the extension of the faucet. Has to be stored like this to allow the lid to close.  It’s too tall when in its mounting hole.

It is noisier than the in tank pump alone. Yes, to be clear, the in tank pump is still connected and runs in tandem. I’ll pull it out of the tank later. 

Finally, it’s done. The last bits aren’t as neat as I had hoped, but hey, it works. The console port for the heated air outlet really doesn’t look great. Problem was the console itself is made from such cheap material that it couldn’t stand up to my hacking.

Now the thermostat, where to mount it? Constraints be two. First is I couldn’t be arsed to find some replacement 5 wire cable so I reused the original but with the fire damaged section cut out and the the cable spliced. So the shorter cable limits the range of thermostat placement. Secondly, the cable enters the thermostat from the rear, to make a clean surface mount. That means a hole drilled somewhere and the cable routed through God knows what. Instead of a surface mount I made up a very crude swing away mounting plate from some stainless and added crash bars. Mounted this on the forward face of the kitchen unit, right behind the driver’s seat.

It’s held back by a magnet. Swung out its pretty accessible .

So is this a good spot to monitor cabin temperature? 

I’m pants at running wires neatly. Start out with the best intentions but it ends up looking slapdash.

The heater really throws out the hot air. Without a diffuser on the outlet it’s an air stream like a hairdryer. And it’s not whisper quiet. But it will heat the van and that’s the important thing

I mentioned before that Simon had installed his heater inside his between seats console. I was planning to do the same but I got sidetracked by another idea. I needed a box to enclose the heater, a barrier between the heater and the console. Once again the scraps of aluminum honeycomb material I got from Donovan at Western Edison popped up. I wanted a box that wild be stiff enough to take someone standing on it and the honeycomb was the obvious choice for stiff and light.

Here it is, just butt joints all round with a fillet of PL Premium polyurethane adhesive holding it all together. Some of the exposed honeycomb I filled with bondo. I scuff sanded it all over.

And then I must have had a mini stroke as I decided to try sticking on some old veneer I have had hanging around for years.

This is the first time I’ve tried veneering anything. Back in the day when I did woodworking as a hobby I was fully into oldtool, split, hew, and plane type of work. Thought that veneer was somehow dishonest. Oh the arrogance of youth. 

The bit of veneer I had was not large enough to be able to match grain direction so it turned out to be a bit of a dog’s breakfast. And the corners and edges were not perfect. I hit the corners with sandpaper enough to let a thin line of aluminum show.

Mid century moderne? Late sixties early seventies British speaker style? Drunken Dieter Rams? You might have a better description 🙂

I attached a rare earth magnet to the inside of the box and that really helps to hold the box in place as it grips the heater. Heating air intake is drawn from through the mounting plate and in from the gaps at the rear most part of the plate. The floor slopes away so it turns out that the gap is pretty well equal to the air intake opening.

I could just use the heater as is, but then I would loose the console storage. So I decided to cover up my lovely creation (!) with the console. I took it apart and cut sections out of the cubbies, welded ( hot air and a screwdriver , yeah nasty) the cubby bases back in. Now the console fits down over the box, albeit with less cubby storage room.

No, the hot air ain’t going to come up out of that opening. I’ll cut out the rear end of the console.

Oh, almost forgot about how the heater combustion air intake and exhaust lines are routed. It’s a bit of a pain to connect them up over the front diff, but the intake comes back down and is secured to frame rail near propane tank. 

Hey you see the un-secured gear clamp on the black intake line? When I took the pic I hadn’t got that bugger forward and up into place.

And the exhaust line comes back down on the passenger side to end up at the forward edge of my lateral skid plate.

I’m finishing up the thermostat mounting and wiring, and doing the console rear end mod. That’s for the next post.

The interior cabinetry in my van is pretty tired. Don’t forget it’s from my old 82 Westy, I swapped it all into my 86 tin top syncro when I converted it to a camper. One of the more distressed parts is the rear overhead shelf. The laminate is cracked and the entire span was sagging. Doesn’t help that I carry and axe and other heavyish stuff up there.

So I cut some 1/8″ thick aluminum plate, drilled holes for screws and milled larger ones to reduce a bit of the weight and give it some visual interest. I also drilled a hole to mount one of my new led dimmer switches ( same as the ones I showed in recent post). That switch replaces one that was mounted to the wall. It controls the strip of led lights attached underneath the shelf, right at the rear edge. You can see the edge of the aluminum U channel that the strip is mounted in right below the new support.

I’ve used Robertson head sheet metal screws to attach the plate. I hate Robertson headed fasteners, yes it’s irrational, but I hate how they look. I didn’t have anything else on hand, but I’m thinking I’ll replace them with oval head Phillips machine screws with nuts on the inside.

Should I paint it? I don’t know. Maybe just some more rubbing with maroon scotchbrite and some wax.

I’ve modified my led light set up in the van a little since last update here, one change was to move the strip above the sliding door to a higher position and to contain the strip in a channel and add a diffuser cover to it. And the other day I replaced the dimmer switches with what I think are much nicer units.

Got them from Banggood, link here.

Annoyingly, I didn’t get the nut on the threaded shank shown in the the image. Looks to be a M20 x 1 thread. I managed to cobble up retainers to hold the switches in place.

Made an aluminum mounting plate and mounted that to rear most air vent. Switch action nice, light touch turns on or off, long hold dims or brightens. Blue glowing ring so you can see them in the dark. I tried measuring the current draw for the glowing light, I got 2.5 mA reading but the number crept up to 11 mA after a few seconds but then dropped back to 2.5 when I touched the switch. Must be something to do with the capacitance switch gubbins. The blue glow is not bright enough to be obnoxious.

They are made from plastic, chrome plated, but they seem to be good quality. They did come with the connectors as shown, the same type I had to buy separately for the old switches.

Only 2 switches wired up so far, one for the strip above the sliding door ( can see that in the pic) and the other fro the strip above the kitchen. The two spares for future lights.

Someone I know needs to be able to get to roof top carrier. She’s been humming and hawing about the options available. The RMW ladder that fixes to the jack points wasn’t that appealing. I made this today and if she doesn’t like it I’ll keep it. It actually works.

It folds up, pieces are connected with bungee cords just like tent poles. Fits into luggage rack on Westy.

Unfolded.

Hooks onto gutter.

Yes you can.

We’re talking about the adjustable armrests. The procedure is pretty straightforward but there is one important warning. Do not unscrew the adjusting knob. Please don’t. I did do that (on one of the armrests I got on the old skanky seat I bought a  couple of weeks ago ) and I haven’t managed to get it screwed back in. Unscrewing the knob (armrest on the bench, I don’t think you can unscrew all the way when armrest is on the seat) releases some part of the adjusting gubbins that appear to be inaccessible.

So don’t unscrew the knob.

Ok, on to the procedure. You know that you have to drive out a roll pin to remove the arm from the seat. It’s a little awkward as the upholstery gets in the way.

.

Then lay the arm upside down on the bench. The knob is pressed onto the end of the steel shaft. There are splines, and it is tightly pressed on. This picture taken after I had the knob levered al,out all the way off.

I used a big screwdriver to lever the knob off.

Now that the knob is off, remove both screws holding the plastic trim to the arm.

Dig out the staples and the cover will come off.

That’s it!

This naked arm is going to a friend who has a broken arm, you know what I mean, and her old arm cover put on.  I’m digging into the other arm, the one that I unscrewed the adjusting knob all the way – don’t do that! – and so far it doesn’t look too good that there will be an easy way to get into the mysteries. The foam is cast around a plastic shell and a beech wood stiffener. Maybe more on that mess later.