(written on December 23rd from notes taken previously)
I woke up this morning grateful to not have been bothered by any parking enforcement people. As best as I knew, I was in a legal parking place, with a bunch of campers parked illegally in the area just below me, but still, with no explicit sign giving permission, I always have at least a few nerves.
There was a cat that hung around for a bit this morning. I’m not sure if it was feral or not. Feral cats are definitely a thing in New Zealand, along with pigs and goats and horses, etc.
Today was van day–both power window diagnosis/repair and bug screen installation efforts.
My first efforts were to try and figure out what on earth was going on with the middle window on the passenger side.
I pulled off trim panels and weatherstripping. I tested and tested and tested some more.
I messed with a relay, cleaned a ground, and tested wires from the motor to the switch and all the way to the BCM.
I cleaned the battery terminal.
I called and chatted with my brother Richard because Kama though he doesn’t have as much automotive knowledge as I do overall, he does have a decent amount, and he’s wicked smart, so he’s a fabulous person to gut check my thinking with and see if I’m missing anything obvious.
Eventually, I started putting everything back together, and when I did, what would you guess happened?
Yep! You guessed it. It worked. 🙃
Was it switching a relay? Was it cleaning the ground?
As I was putting everything back together, specifically aligning the male connector plate that connects the electrical from the middle structural pillar of the van to the female contact on sliding door itself (when closed), I felt like I remembered the plate being 180° flipped. That is, once I check the contacts and match them up with the door itself, I felt like I remembered that the male end was actually flipped 180 degrees originally, so I was putting it back together opposite from the way it was when I took it apart.
So maybe that’s what fixed it? Maybe it was just that someone had it upside down, flipped 180 degrees the wrong way the whole time and by taking it apart, I realised that it had been installed incorrectly previously?
That’s my best guess, at this point.
It certainly was a weird issue.
That took a good little while to get all straightened out, but I am grateful to now have a functional middle window on both sides, which will allow at least some amount of cross ventilation.
I know the bug screen will significantly reduce the amount of ventilation that’s possible because the little squares are so darn tiny, but a little ventilation is a lot better than no ventilation if it’s keeping out mosquitoes and sand flies.
Oh, in all my testing, I managed to drain down my battery, so I needed a jump start again from somebody–this time in New Zealand couple that asked some questions about van life, as the young woman was considering buying a van herself.
The bug screen project took the entire rest of day. 😅
But at least I have screens on the two middle windows! It took heaps of patience, some concessions, some creativity, and just a lot of time, but in the end, I now have screens that will keep out all biting insects.
Gratefully, I didn’t damage the other rain shield getting it taken off. Part of that I think is having done it once before and knowing what I was getting into, and I think part of that is also that it was a little bit hotter today, so it made the plastic more pliable and the sticky stuff a little easier to cut through.
I ended up just using duct tape for the strength requirements, encasing all the edges of the screen in duct tape, so the tape on one side would stick to the tape on the other side through the mesh holes in the screen, thus keeping the screen from slipping off the tape.
Then I simply used duct tape to attach the screens to the van (after having spent a good amount of time getting all the stickum off of the van of course).
It was super challenging getting the screens on without any waves, and I didn’t entirely succeed, but it looks pretty decent with few waves.
Then I used a relatively wide electrical style of tape, black in color, to run over the top of the duct tape to be a little bit more aesthetically pleasing.
In the end, it kind of looks like somebody smashed in the windows and I’ve got a covering taped over them, but it’s functional.
Hopefully it holds up to 110 kmh road speeds. 🤞
While I was in the middle of working on all of that, a lady pulled up behind me, and I noticed oil leaking from the bottom of her engine. She said she knew that it was leaking but wasn’t sure what was going on and was concerned, so I had her pop her hood, and I checked the oil, and she was quite low, but not at dangerous levels yet.
I crawled under her car quickly and found that her oil filter had a hole in it. A company had changed her oil, and from everything that I could see, it looked like they had used a tool to loosen up the oil filter but had forgotten to actually replace the oil filter, and the tool had punctured the oil filter in the loosening process.
Not good at all. Massive mistake, but also one that happens. It’s one (of the many) reasons I didn’t do oil changes. As a mechanic, you don’t make almost anything, and the risk to reward ratio is just too big for me.
I told her what was going on with her car, so she won’t need to take it to a mechanic: she can just have her husband pick up an oil filter and some oil, unscrew the old one, and screw on the new one.
Presto. changeo. done.
After the window fix, the screen installation, and all the rest, the day was spent, and I headed back to the same spot as last night to crash again
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 