Daily Race Van

This van has a peculiar lack of power outlets. There is 1 12V DC cigar lighter socket at the drivers position and a few 240V AC sockets in the rear, 2 of which are hidden in cupboards. This was particularly annoying when you need to charge your phones at night or keep said phones topped up whilst driving with one socket. A first step in sorting this out was to add a twin 1.5A USB charging socket to the rear of the van. I wasn't sure where yet but a bit of time spent looking about for a suitable spot brought me to the sofa bed. It has an arm rest behind the drivers seat where there is ample space for a power socket or three and is near to easy accessed power. The other benefit of this location is that it is easily accessed from the driving or living compartments. Out came my hole cutting set which I used to cut a 35mm hole for the socket body to sit into. This piece of ply wood I was drilling is crazy thick, about 2" in fact! It took me two attempts to get through it wit

This is a fault diagnosis blog entry for my IVECO Daily Mk3 35S12 2.3 XLWB. I present them in a set way so that f you have the same symptom you can find my fix for that problem.  It is formatted in three sections  Fault Symptom, Fault Invest  &  Fault Fix.  This will give you the freedom to read through or pick out the info you need more easily. Remember: there is no one one answer to each problem (well not often) so although this might have fixed my problem, that isn't to say it will fix yours. Also I am no subject matter expert so I may not know a system to the highest detail.  Fault Sypmptom Whilst driving the van the hand brake light will flicker on after a while. Pushing the handbrake handle brake down will turn the light off for it to come back on again a short while later.  Fault Invest Not much going on here. My fist suspicion was the hand brake micro switch. I checked it out for adjustment and condition. I found the switch full of horse hair and the arm b

This is a fault diagnosis blog entry for my IVECO Daily Mk3 35S12 2.3 XLWB. I present them in a set way so that f you have the same symptom you can find my fix for that problem.  It is formatted in three sections Fault Symptom, Fault Invest & Fault Fix. This will give you the freedom to read through or pick out the info you need more easily. Remember: there is no one one answer to each problem (well not often) so although this might have fixed my problem, that isn't to say it will fix yours. Also I am no subject matter expert so I may not know a system to the highest detail.  Fault Sypmptom The heater blower only operates when in speed position 4. All other positions, when selected, the fan does not operate. You could argue position 0 is then working as that is supposed to be off but seriously shush. Fault Invest For this one you can pretty much skip to the fix but I will ramble here about some other stuff that might be of help if this doesn't fix your problem. N

... some pun about speakers? After fitting my pimp AF head unit I decided to go and buy some speakers too. Lets see how exciting that is!!! The standard speakers performed nicely with the uprated  headunit but as ever, I knew I could do better. The speakers were old so would probably give in soon anyway.  I shopped around (very little to tell the truth ) to find the best balance of performance and cost. I intend to add more speakers in the near future so they didn't need to set the world on fire. The OE speakers on the Daily are 4"x6" in size which aren't hugely popular as a choice these days but there is still a fair amount out there in the after market world. The Alpine  sxe 4625-s   had come up on forums as a basically bolt in option which along with their fairly low price tag, made them pretty appealing. Reviews were fairly middle  of the road  to positive  at best but I wan't expecting my mind to be blown for £27. They arrived in a couple of day

Why have you got skateboard wheels? A reasonable question, I am 35 years old, in desperate need of growing up. I do continue to fight it so I can understand family concerns that I might be regressing back to teenage past times. But no, I had other ideas for these wheels. The drivers window winding handle on my Iveco Daily was missing its knob. This makes the archaic process of manually opening a window painful (I mean seriously, my 1992 VW Corrado has electric windows, this is from a different decade and still sucks!) but where there's a turd sandwich, make lemonade? I had seen skateboard wheels used as winder knobs before so decided to do the same thing here. As a (completely useless) skateboarding fan of old I had to do some justice to this however. You can do this very cheaply if you wish, wheels are a couple of quid as are bearings on eBay but I wanted to do a little better than that. Brands have changed but it's fairly easy to pic a wheel that has the look and

A great way to find flaws is through testing. What better test than a bolt down the country to the south downs followed by two days of touring? A very last minute holiday plan saw us hitting the road on a Wednesday, heading from Lincoln down to roughly Brighton way. We then tried to complete a Geotour of the Southdowns  taking in 40 different sites across the whole range of hills. This would present a range of challenges to find issue with the van whilst driving in varied situations not to mention actually camping in it. Here is what I found with a few pics along the way, I was on holiday after all. A nice viewing point and it's not raining as much Old rifle range From the get go the speedo didn't work which is a super start. I had no speedo and an injection light but a working tachometre. Also the cruise control worked so clearly signals were coming from somewhere. After a few miles the speedo started to come back to life and was basically back to working prope

After a evenings eBaying I had a weekend of work to do. Last weekend had shown that everything works but is just a bit dated. With this in mind I had bought a small stack of stuff to do a basic service and upgrade some of the front end comfort features. First on the cards I had to squeeze the van down the side of the house (a healthy 10mm clearance on the gates) to get to the hard standing to get the all important service out of the way. The air filter looked new so that could stay. That left me some fresh Castorol Magnatech 10w40 and an oil filter to sort out. One nice feature of having a van that isn't lowered is that I could do the oil change without jacking the car up. I did stick a jack under the right drop leg so I could more easily get the Milwaukee M12 screwdriver in to save some effort with traditionally rusty looking screws on the belly pan. The van only takes 6 ltrs of oil which surprised me but that aside it was about as interesting as an oil change can get.

This is a work in progress but as the blog is being written at the same time as I am working (for a change), I thought I might as well publish it to make it a live update of sorts. So do pop back in the future to see when I finally give up and set the lot on fire. "When you reverse things tend to come from behind ya'." is a quote to remember when driving a near 5 metre long van. Funnily enough I took to reversing this thing without too much trouble but I could see myself hitting some issues or walls if I was at a funny angle... A reversing camera or sensors was the answer. I liked the camera on my T5 so fancied doing something similar on the Daily. Unfortunately my single Din headunit did not provide a suitable screen to display this image so I needed to add a screen somewhere too. To the interwebs to find the answer! There are lots of different reversing cameras out there with optional lights or even IR. I would like to 1080p for better image quality (they