Tearing Into the Van’s Burnt Engine Compartment

Wednesday July 21, 2021 Guerneville CA.

Burnt engine work

So today was the day I was going to dive into the van’s burnt engine to see what happened and what I need to get to fix it.

I removed the engine cover and the engine compartment so it’s easier to work on and see what’s going on.

It doesn’t really look that bad considering how much smoke was coming out of it during the fire.

It looks like the hottest part of the fire is on the right side of this picture so there should be some type of gas line leak around here but I found I had installed metal gas lines so there was no leak here.

Looks like a hole here

But there looked like a hole in that rubber gas line near the center of the pic. It looks like gas was spraying out of this hole and shooting over to the hot spot.

Heat shield

So I had a look at the engine cover over the hot spot. It tells the tail of why this fire wasn’t worse than it was. The fuel was being sprayed onto this heat insulation which made it a big torch so  most of the fire must have been on this part, you can see the white streaks from the fuel. This is some kind of fire resistant material.

Taking things apart

I slowly started taking things apart, starting with the driver’s seat as that’s were a lot of the wiring goes to the computer and the front dash.

I removed the distributor and the spark plug wires. I will need new ones of those.

Burned up wire harness

And this is what is left of my computer wire harness. At least most of the sensors look ok and I’ll just have to replace the wire harness.

The damage

So it looks like it comes down to this. I’ll need a new distributor and new spark plug wires and I’ll need a new wiring harness for the computer and a new air cleaner and two new electric radiator fans and a bunch of burnt wiring to replace.

Rodent trap improvement work

Late in the day I worked on the rodent trap’s improvements and got this one completed and ready to go.   I added half inch hole wire over the once inch wire to prevent smaller critters from escaping.               `

In the evening I chair hopped and puttered around the yard mostly just enjoying things.

Nice day.