Daily Race Van

  The hawk eyed among you will have spotted a rather snazzy awning in some of my earlier photographs and; yes it did come with the van. Maybe it was time to throw it up and see if was all there or not. Having recently tested the Fiammi awning at Cadwell park with the Honda VFR750 and Yamaha RD250 taking shelter underneath it, I thought it was high time I gave the proper awning a go. Well it was that or study so was a tough choice. The awning is by  Terapin  who make awnings and gazebos for events and major motorsports teams around the world. Clearly most suitable for someone with my racing pedigree. It is massive and I was not convinced that it was all there so a test pitch was well worth while. I spent bloody hours figuring it out (no instructions) but now I have it down I thought I would share a few stage photographs in part to help anyone else trying to tackle a pile of parts and to remind me next time I try to pitch this monster.   Process ...

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 fu...

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. ...

... 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 c...

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...