Category: van

The Summer of Ven: Operation Exhaustive Measures

chorl

Time for another throwback to the “Post of Everything“! As you might recall, Mikuvan had a little boo-boo on one of my mountain romps:

The entire exhaust path from the axle-clearing bend back fell off in late May when I was on the Tail of the Dragon. Yes, fell off. As in the person behind me had to dodge it.

I last redid the exhaust on this very site back in 2017, but I guess just a few years of winter road salt will do that to you. I had to zip that exhaust together with clamps in the parking lot in a day, so it was never really that well put together anyhow. To do it again, I challenged myself to make a fully welded path with a proper way to disconnect it at the downpipe if I were to have to change it again, how they say…. down the road.

Remember, despite what this site may seem to recently indicate, I am fundamentally not a “car guy”. I had to do some research on what technologies existed out there for connecting exhaust pipes besides impact-gunning a U-bolt clamp down. I settled on using V-band clamps, as they seemed both statically determinate once attached and relatively easy to work with, versus say flaring the tubes or welding on independent flanges.

I began collecting a few parts online such as the 2.25″ V-band flanges and bands. I got the piping itself just from auto parts stores for now – just regular ol’ “aluminized steel”. I’m sure this will last just as long.

In doing the same research, I got some 309 alloy welding wire to make the join between the stainless steel V-band flanges and the mystery ferrous exhaust pipe. I otherwise had plenty of regular ER70 wire.

So one night I decided to go ahead and drop the rest of the exhaust out and start measuring things up. Due to my brute force surgery on the downpipe flange to replace the mismatched nuts with big 17mm-headed M10 bolts, I was actually able to pull it off easily.

I can’t say the same at all for the rest of it. Natural Bostonian Loctite made getting everything else off an exercise in a lot of hammering and impact driving. I mean, not like I was trying to keep this or anything, but even separating that downpipe connection was a ton of effort.

The first adaptation step was turning the roughly 1-7/8 sized (or 50mm, perhaps) downpipe into the 2.25 diameter needed for the V-flange. I simply flared a 1.75″ to 2.25″ adapter slightly and slit the downpipe to shrink down its OD slightly.

I fixtured and tack welded the other end with V-band flanges to get an idea of how it’ll go together.

I then smashed the downpipe adapter onto the downpipe using my previous “flare” and “compression” fit and a hammer. The fit was tight enough that I went ahead and installed it back on the exhaust manifold, and adjusted the angle of the adapter tube to point as straight backwards as I could visually line it up. That means the flange is as straight as possible to alleviate any other bending. I then tack-welded it in place.

Step 1 completed! I fully welded the downpipe to the adapter after making sure the fit was good. This one was a little blobby because I had to be careful not to pierce through the old, thinned downpipe steel. I kept the voltage low and made two passes, and also had to close up the slits I made to let the downpipe compress into the adapter.

Next order of business was to measure the old axle hump dimensions and replicate them in the new piping.

Notice one little detail here? The 45 degree “turndown” at the end of the new setup isn’t actually a turndown tip, it’s just another piece of 45 degree bend. I was just going to cut it off to make my own turndown, as at the time, Pep Boys was out of 2.25″ turndowns.

On the new tubing it was much easier to make a clean weld all the way around. In fact, I think I found 120-volt Limewelder’s calling: lightweight tube fabrication. I mean, it’s all you can really use a 120V welder for anyhow.

The workpiece was getting long enough now that I was having to come up with more and more creative ways to fixture it.

I worked from both ends for this operation. First, I dummy-fit the downpipe, the V-band connection, and the flex pipe. Then I independently hung the main exhaust path where I wanted it, so I could take a measurement of how much gap there is between them.

A little more Creative Fixturing later and I now have the entire “downpipe-back” exhaust path completed.

And here it is! Not a single U-bolt clamp. I dunno, I think my next step might be to learn how to bend straight tubes well. I’ve seen people do intricate “pie cut” bends, but that’s several pay grades above how hard I am willing to neckbeard for something like this.

And now installed in place with the band tightened. I’m a fan of this setup, as I could conceivably (dunno why I would, but…) swap this out at any time for something else. It’s hung in the center with the flexible hanger seen in an earlier photo, and then attached at the very back by the trailer hitch like last time:

Admittedly, my custom “turndown” is a little too turnt down,and I was afraid of stubbing it accidentally on a curb or parking brick, so I trimmed it up further not long after this install.

My thoughts? I’m not planning on becoming an exhaust bending master, but I now know the capabilities of my shop. Vantruck is likely next on the list for exhaust work, as it’s had the same exposure to salt up north and I’m itching to add some stacks to the thing some day.

The Summer of Ven: The Electrical Phantasmagoria of Murdervan

chorl

Here’s a surprise retropost for you! I actually blocked out this post about Murdervan from a template some time last August, before I sold the sitevan and bought a new one. I ended up never finishing it in lieu of updates about Spool Bus and quite a few robot events, because after all was said and done, Murdervan didn’t have much wrong with it. I put a few hundred miles on it just around town as a daily errand runner but with more curb jumping and casual non-roading – note I didn’t say “off-roading” for a reason, just going places that isn’t…. public paved roads. What, who’s gonna stop me?

By July, though, I noticed it had developed a habit of popping the fuse for auxiliary lighting. This meant no running lights, no dashboard lights, and so on. The horn was also involved, straightly enough. If I put new fuses in for either circuit, they’d go if I tried to turn on interior lights or …. use the horn.

What it told me was some ghostly electrical problem residing in the dashboard area, the kind of electrical problem that gets a lot of things junked, probably even more so today as cars depend highly on all sorts of electronics and software. Luckily, this thing is so paleo that it was probably shorted wires to ground somewhere, like from chafing or a previous overheating adventure that is only now manifesting. The only trouble is now finding where.

I’ve said frequently now that part of the upside of having a flock of misfit ven, especially a new cast member you dug out of someone’s yard, is that it helps alleviate the fear of “Well what if I can’t put it back together again?”. So what if I can’t? Murdervan was going to be a helpful lesson for any issues Vantruck might have in the future. So I just dug in and started removing all the dashboard panels and bezels to expose as much wiring as I could.

The usual aftermarket service manuals are pretty worthless for electrical systems, but at least they contain (usually several versions of) system diagrams with wire colors and general locations I could follow around. I started with the horn circuit, for example, which is a greenish-yellow wire. I found it in the steering column bundle and followed it outside the van through this bulkhead connector in front of the driver’s floor:

So by 1991, they turned what was just a big bundle through a body grommet (in Vantruck and Spool Bus) into an actual bulkhead connector. This is certainly an improvement!

I continued to follow the yellow-green wire around through the various harnesses until I confirmed that yeah, it just ended at the horns.

So…. What’s the deal? When the horns are used, presumably this wire is energized, and in doing so, bad happens. Very strange.

This is a view of the bundle that goes up to the steering column. The auxiliary lighting circuit, a blue-red wire, has a branch that goes up here too for dashboard lighting and the like.

Like any good and competent engineer, I started jumping fuses and put the whole van on one of my lab power supplies to give it a maximum of 15 amps into the various circuits. My goal was to feel around (absent having a FLIR camera on me) for what wires got hot as I held various switches and buttons down to energize the circuits.

This is a more legitimate method of finding shorts and high-resistance areas than you might think….provided you’re sane about it. I wasn’t, and with that 15 amps and non-judicious use of the horn switch, I started smelling terrible things.

Turns out I roasted the horn switch. Oops. The mystery still isn’t solved, but at least I’ve knocked one branch of it completely out of the picture.

As I continued to pump 15 amps now into the auxiliary lighting circuit, I felt the red-blue wire inside the bundle that went into the steering column get warmer. So the power supply feed to the steering column was acting up, and either it or the horn switch (in the process of giving the power to the horn circuit) was causing a short.

That means the steering wheel had to now come off. I actually bought a steering wheel puller a long time ago for Vantruck to correct it’s 15 degree “Left is Straight” error, but never used it because, again, I wasn’t in a good position to not be able to put it back together quickly.

Well now I don’t give a shit, so off the steering wheel comes! Under the steering wheel lies some slip rings and switches like the turn signal switch. Any one of those could be the source of the shorting problem.

I continued to dismantle the steering column as well, following the red-blue wire upwards. I noticed that it was grounded to the steering column at one end (that screw terminal in the middle) yet somehow also carried power. What?

More digging revealed that it wasn’t some kind of Ford Family of Fine Fuckups engineering choice to float the entire steering column at 12 volts, but that they just got lazy and used the same wiring color to go into this weird connector here that…. Hey, wait a minute.

I found out what this was: It’s the light bulb socket to light up the PRND69L transmission indicator. There is no light bulb in it. The contacts had for some reason melted together, and was Shorting the 12v auxiliary lighting feeder wire straight to ground through the steering column!

Well I found my villain there. Check out that burn mark where the whole thing heated up! Oddly enough, the contacts themselves were not damaged, just touching. I just pried apart the housing a little, back to its un-deformed shape, then stuffed in an obnoxiously bright T5-sized white LED bulb, and suddenly, all was fine.

I’m not going to ask questions about how this interacted with the horn circuit. The only possibility I can think of is, this auxiliary circuit also supplies power to the horn, and when I close the switch, it just finds a path to ground instead of to the horn wire.

Whatever the case is, my “Debugging By Fire” approach damaged the slip ring contacts that allow you to have buttons on the steering wheel (Murdervan has the cruise control steering wheel buttons, but the actuator appears to have been taken out under the hood). I pushed a fix where I twisted a stripped end of wire very tightly around the spring plunger since the original wire attachment tabs had been melted off.

With the short now resolved, I tested that I in fact had dashboard and running lights again, and the horn worked. Again, I have no idea how these two problems were possibly inter-related, but here we are. This is what ghost hunting is all about, right?

Well, it’s certainly time to put this absolute disaster area together. But as I did so, I decided to go on an electrical binge and take care of an Annoying “Feels Good” thing that had remained unaddressed for a few weeks.

Up to this point, I had jumped the glow plug controller relay with a set of alligator clips hanging out of the doghouse/internal engine cover because I dug all of the fried electronics out of it before. So I’d jump in, connect the alligator clips, count to 10, and then disconnect them.

While I had the dashboard taken apart, I decided to make this hack permanent and run it to a button on the dashboard.

So to start, I wired one side of the contactor to the 12V feeder line coming from the battery. That means I just have to touch the other terminal to ground to throw the relay.

I ran this trigger wire up and around the engine cave, following other wiring harnesses, and into the dashboard area through some spare grommets.

I put this wire on the Magic Button that Murdervan came with. That’s right, it’s always had a Magic Button here. What did it do? Hell if I know, the wires ran somewhere underneath and just ended. I’m guessing it might have been a light switch or secret turbo boost/methanol injection button or something, since it was momentary and not latching. Whatever the case, it’s now the glow plug activation button.

The other side of the button was appended to the nearby main interior body ground.

And there we have it. I get in, push the button, count to 10, and let it go! This was the state I ended up selling Murdervan in – I never put in a new glow plug control module, and just explained it to the buyer who (as I mentioned, was familiar already with old Ford diesels) didn’t even bat an eye at it. I assume this is a common remedy for the dubious OEM electrical system anyway.