Sunday July 19, 2015 Guerneville CA.
Installed an electric fan
I worked on the van all day today doing little things to make it better. First I needed to power up and install a switch for an electric fan I installed in the front of the radiator. Not attached to the radiator, but a foot or so in front of it, mounted on the air scoop pan. My purpose is to move some more air into the radiator and into the van’s engine compartment which doesn’t get good air flow because of how it’s made, especially at lower speeds and going up long hills that slow it down.
I was working here under the tire hooking up the fans power to run it. I got the twelve volts off the electric winch control system, right under the tire.
This is the winch control system were I tapped in a fuse. I installed a switch to turn it on and off inside the cab.
Next, I installed the fan belts and adjusted them.
The new radiator holds more fluid
Then I installed the new battery and filled up the new radiator with fluid. The new radiator takes a lot more fluid then the old one. I put over two gallons in there which is good.
I had to install a volt meter gauge, but I didn’t like how the new one installed so I got on line and found the right one on Amazon. It would be easier to install the right gauge instead of Mickey Moussing the wrong one.
Backup lights don’t work
Now that the battery was hooked up I could test the new backup lights I installed. I tried turning them on and none of the backup lights worked, not even the old ones. I remembered I hadn’t hooked up the ground wire for the new lights so I did that, but that wouldn’t of stopped the old lights from working so I had to do some more trouble shooting. I remembered I had had some trouble with the backup switch a while back so I checked that by shorting a wire across it’s contacts and that made the backup lights work. At first I was going to replace the backup switch, but looking at it more closely, I found that if I adjusted it’s activator lever a bit, it would work.
So now I have four backup lights. As I’m getting older, it’s harder to judge distance when backing up, so I hope this extra light will improve on that a bit.
Four backup lights shining.
Engine tests out good
It was time to start the engine and test everything out. No water leaks and the gauges all worked properly.
Doing all this work getting in and out and under and out again many times makes the older body a bit on the sore side so I was losing steam.
Started construction on the fan shroud
But I still had the fan shroud to construct and I was curious to how it might turn out, so I marked the plastic barrel and cut out this circle to construct a fan shroud.
I measured and trimmed the circle and tried to install it, but it didn’t install well, so I cut the whole bottom off the circle and now it goes in ok and might work out. But it got dark so I had to quite for the day.
I have fixed most of the things on the van I needed to fix. There’s only a few little things left to fix and then it needs a good test out.
For now, I’m beat from all this mechanicing.
