- 3,770
- Boss-Barracuda
I know most of you won't care because all in all it's not really that interesting of a project, but I like documenting things and would like to be able to find and look at what i did later on. To get the people who didn't see it in the "What have you done to your car today?" thread up to speed, here is what I posted there:
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"My friend did the most random thing today, he bought a van. Not just a van, but a literal hippie van with hippie stickers and all. He was driving back to his house and he saw it on the street for sale for $300. Turns out the couple that owned it had been living in it for the past two weeks, but for $300 it's a steal.
The underside of it is immaculate, with the only mechanical issues being an anti-freeze leak and the air con doesn't work. Its also missing its rear and middle seats, and the carpet definately needs some cleaning. The body is where the major problems are though because the rear doors are dented in (must have backed into something with the spare on), the rear bumper is slightly bent, and the front bumper is slightly bent. The paint is also all scratched up and faded but what do you expect.
Today my friend and I cleaned and vacuumed it out, worked on trying to fix the rear doors, then started to take the front bumper off. Whenever he can hes gunna shampoo the carpets and seats so that it is bearable to work on inside, and maybe even dye the carpet while hes already shampooing it. There's lots of things that need to be done, but it gives us something to do, and in the end he can sell it for a profit."
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Now, since then we've done a good bit of work so I'm going to pick up from there and show what else we've been working on. All pictures will be clickable for a larger 1600x1200 picture. First some pictures of what it looked like before.
You can see it's quite a dent they put into it. We took the spare tire holder off to try and hit the dents out, not much luck.
Now onto the progress:
Took the bumper off
Shampooed the carpets. This was only after doing a small portion in the middle of the van, and that was with the small scrubber. We eventually just put the whole machine in there and used that instead, quite an enormous difference, even in the parts we had already done.
Removed the fascia.
The carpets after they had dried. Much much better, even tolerable to sit on.
Removed parts of the front end.
Getting ready to take the radiator out and it leaking anti-freeze all over the place. Who needs a bucket
After a lot of coercing the radiator and both halves of the fan shroud were out. Very spacious once you get them out actually.
When we took the radiator out we found that it sits on two metal plates, not just one big one, so the leak has to be on the right side. We filled it up with water and it didn't leak but we didn't think to try it with pressure before we put it back in. Since the lines are dry and the areas around the lines are dry it has to be the drain valve since it's right there. We just realized that we should have tested it with pressure right as we had it back in and connected so we basically said screw it and bought some really strong stop leak stuff. We ran it for 30 minutes and the leak seamed to have stopped so hopefully that's the end of that.
There will be more updates to come but for now, that's all I got.
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"My friend did the most random thing today, he bought a van. Not just a van, but a literal hippie van with hippie stickers and all. He was driving back to his house and he saw it on the street for sale for $300. Turns out the couple that owned it had been living in it for the past two weeks, but for $300 it's a steal.
The underside of it is immaculate, with the only mechanical issues being an anti-freeze leak and the air con doesn't work. Its also missing its rear and middle seats, and the carpet definately needs some cleaning. The body is where the major problems are though because the rear doors are dented in (must have backed into something with the spare on), the rear bumper is slightly bent, and the front bumper is slightly bent. The paint is also all scratched up and faded but what do you expect.
Today my friend and I cleaned and vacuumed it out, worked on trying to fix the rear doors, then started to take the front bumper off. Whenever he can hes gunna shampoo the carpets and seats so that it is bearable to work on inside, and maybe even dye the carpet while hes already shampooing it. There's lots of things that need to be done, but it gives us something to do, and in the end he can sell it for a profit."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, since then we've done a good bit of work so I'm going to pick up from there and show what else we've been working on. All pictures will be clickable for a larger 1600x1200 picture. First some pictures of what it looked like before.
You can see it's quite a dent they put into it. We took the spare tire holder off to try and hit the dents out, not much luck.
Now onto the progress:
Took the bumper off
Shampooed the carpets. This was only after doing a small portion in the middle of the van, and that was with the small scrubber. We eventually just put the whole machine in there and used that instead, quite an enormous difference, even in the parts we had already done.
Removed the fascia.
The carpets after they had dried. Much much better, even tolerable to sit on.
Removed parts of the front end.
Getting ready to take the radiator out and it leaking anti-freeze all over the place. Who needs a bucket
After a lot of coercing the radiator and both halves of the fan shroud were out. Very spacious once you get them out actually.
When we took the radiator out we found that it sits on two metal plates, not just one big one, so the leak has to be on the right side. We filled it up with water and it didn't leak but we didn't think to try it with pressure before we put it back in. Since the lines are dry and the areas around the lines are dry it has to be the drain valve since it's right there. We just realized that we should have tested it with pressure right as we had it back in and connected so we basically said screw it and bought some really strong stop leak stuff. We ran it for 30 minutes and the leak seamed to have stopped so hopefully that's the end of that.
There will be more updates to come but for now, that's all I got.
you do know that stuff is meant to be temporary right 
it might plug up leaks but it will also plug up narrow parts of the cooling system. as i have fondly discovered!
