The Van!

The Van Plan

Category: The Experience

  • The Turbo – A Rattle and a Riddle

    If you’ve been following along, you’ll remember that back in the maiden voyage post I mentioned, almost in passing, that the turbo needed some attention. I left it there at the time, a loose thread to be picked up later. Well, later has arrived, and as it turns out that loose thread unravelled into something rather larger than I’d bargained for.

    Before I go further: if you’ve never been entirely sure what a turbocharger actually is, or why a part the size of your fist can cause this much trouble and fascination in equal measure, I’ve written a separate page explaining the whole thing from first principles. It’s genuinely one of the most elegant pieces of engineering on the van. It makes power out of the engine’s own waste, and the rest of this story makes far more sense if you’ve read it. You’ll find it here: [The Turbo]. Go on, have a look. I’ll wait.

    The two symptoms

    The trouble announced itself in two ways.

    The first I’d felt for most of the long drive home: the power was simply lacking. Not dramatically, not a breakdown-on-the-hard-shoulder sort of problem, but a persistent sense that Morrison was working harder than he should to do less than he ought. On the flat you’d not notice. On a long climb, fully loaded, you noticed.

    The second was harder to ignore, and it arrived once we were home: a rattle. A distinct, mechanical rattle coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the turbo. Now, a rattle near a part that spins faster than anything else on the vehicle, floating on a thin film of oil, is the kind of sound that gets your full attention rather quickly. My mind went straight to the worst case: something loose, something failing, metal somewhere it shouldn’t be. There was nothing for it but to take the turbo off and have a proper look.

    Getting the thing out

    This is where the fun started, and I use the word “fun” in the way only someone who has since recovered from the experience can.

    Two of the bolts holding the turbo in place were, to put it generously, thoughtfully positioned, which is to say almost impossible to reach. Getting to them meant first removing a whole cluster of other components around the exhaust side of the engine, none of which had anything wrong with them and all of which simply happened to be in the way. So off they came.

    Then remove all the turbo connections in the usual order: the air feed, the charged-air pipe, the oil feed and the oil drain. Then next the turbo’s exhaust outlet had to be disconnected, and that meant going underneath the van to loosen the bolts securing the exhaust itself. And here I found something odd: those bolts were loose already. Properly loose. I noted them as a job to put right on reassembly, and carried on.

    Finally, with the exhaust freed, it was a simple matter of removing the turbo mount. And with that, hey presto, the turbo was out and on the bench.

    The good news, and the real mystery

    The first inspection was reassuring. The turbine, the compressor wheel and the shaft joining them were all in good order. No damage to the blades, no scoring, and crucially no untoward movement in the shaft, no play or wobble that would have spelled worn bearings. The heart of the turbo was healthy.

    And that is when the penny finally dropped about the rattle. If the turbo’s insides were sound, then the noise had never been coming from the turbo at all. It was those loose exhaust bolts, the exhaust knocking about because its fixings had worked their way loose, throwing a sound up into the engine bay that, for all the world, had seemed to be coming from the turbo. One of my two problems, solved almost by accident, and nowhere near where I’d been looking.

    So if the spinning parts were fine, why the missing power? For that, I had to look at the part of the turbo that controls it.

    The clever bit: how a turbo knows when to work

    The separate page touches on this, but it’s worth spelling out here, because it’s central to the whole story.

    A turbo doesn’t want to be making full boost all the time. At low engine speeds there’s barely any exhaust to drive it, and the moment a driver lifts off the throttle you want it to stop forcing air in, and stop quickly. So a modern turbo like Morrison’s is a cleverer thing than a simple fixed device: it adjusts itself, moment to moment, while the engine runs.

    The way it manages this is rather beautiful. Inside the exhaust housing, ringed around the turbine, sits a set of small movable fins, or vanes. By changing their angle, the turbo changes how the exhaust gas is aimed at the turbine. Close the fins down and the gas is funnelled through narrow gaps, speeding up and hitting the turbine hard, giving lots of boost even at low engine speed. Open them up and the gas flows past gently, giving little boost but instant response when you back off. It’s the same trick as putting your thumb over the end of a hose to make the water shoot further.

    Something has to move those fins, and that something is the actuator, the black unit you can see mounted on the middle of the turbo. The actuator, in turn, doesn’t run on electricity or oil pressure but on vacuum: gentle suction, drawn from the engine, that pulls a diaphragm inside the actuator and moves a rod connected to the fins. The more vacuum applied, the further the rod travels and the more the fins move.

    Of course, vacuum on its own is just vacuum, and it needs to be metered out precisely. That’s the job of a small electronic valve called a transducer (you may also see it called a boost-pressure solenoid or an electro-pneumatic converter, same idea). The engine’s computer tells the transducer how much vacuum to pass through to the actuator at any given instant, and so, indirectly, the computer commands the fins. Brain, to valve, to vacuum, to rod, to fins. That’s the chain.

    Where it had all gone wrong

    Now to the interesting part.

    That actuator is supposed to begin moving the rod at a fairly modest vacuum, somewhere around 150 mmHg, and to reach the end of its travel by around 420 mmHg. That’s the window the engine’s computer is designed to work within, and I’d tracked down a technical document for the actuator that confirmed those figures.

    But when I tested Morrison’s, the actuator wasn’t starting to move until around 400 mmHg, and wasn’t reaching full travel until something like 700. In other words, the whole operating window had been shifted far out of reach. The vanes weren’t even beginning to close until the vacuum was already up where they should have been very nearly fully deployed. The computer was asking for boost in its normal range, and the actuator was effectively shrugging and saying not yet, not yet, never moving the fins enough to spin the turbo up properly. The turbo was barely engaging at all.

    And there it was. The missing power, explained. Morrison hadn’t been ill so much as half-asleep.

    The fix, mercifully, was simple in principle: the actuator rod has a threaded adjuster, and by threading it in I could bring the start of its travel back to the correct pressure. I set it so movement began low, back around that 150 mmHg mark, with full travel arriving in the low 400s, right in line with the document. One small, oddly satisfying detail: there was a blob of weld sitting right at the point I eventually adjusted it to. Someone, at some time, had deliberately set this actuator and fixed it in place. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about that for now; it’s a thread I’ll come back to.

    Buttoning it back up

    With the actuator set correctly, it was time to reassemble, and that meant new gaskets.

    A gasket is simply a thin layer of material that sits in the joint between two metal parts and seals it. Metal surfaces are never perfectly flat, and the gaps between them, however tiny, are more than enough for hot exhaust gas or oil under pressure to escape through. The gasket is squeezed between the two faces and deforms to fill every imperfection, making the joint properly gas- and oil-tight. They’re not reusable, either: once a gasket has been crushed into shape and cooked by exhaust heat, it’s done its job and won’t seal a second time. So every joint I’d opened got a fresh one.

    New gaskets in, the turbo went back on: the mount, the exhaust reconnected (and those loose bolts properly torqued this time) the oil drain and feed, the charged-air pipe, the air feed, and finally all the bits and pieces I’d had to strip away to reach the wretched thing in the first place and then check all the fixings are tightened to the correct torque. And away we go.

    So, problem solved, full power restored, lesson learned?

    Well. That was certainly what I thought as I stood back and admired the job. It was also, as it turned out, only the very beginning. Because the actuator was just the first of the things I was about to discover wrong with Morrison’s turbo circuit.

    And it was time to fire it up …

  • 6 June 2026, Bad Kissingen

    The showers came and went all morning, never quite settling into rain proper but never clearing either, and by the time we had finished breakfast it was plain the walk up to Botenlauben was off. We had planned the climb through the woods to the castle, but the sky had other ideas, and I felt no particular loss in it. We have made that walk before, on drier days, and there is a comfort in knowing a place well enough to let the weather decide. So the day became a slow one by agreement, which suited us both.

    We drove into Bad Kissingen and took lunch at one of the town’s bistros. I will not name it, partly because there are several and partly because the one worth recommending one year may have changed hands the next, so the name would only mislead anyone reading this later. The food was unfussy and good, and we sat over it a long while. The talk turned, as it has each evening this week, to the van. We are at the stage of reckoning with how much work is still ahead, which jobs we cannot do ourselves and will need to bring specialists in for, and how to keep the budget from running away, as it so easily does. I will set all that down properly another time, when the decisions are made rather than half-made. For now it is enough to record that the conversation widened rather than narrowed.

    For those who follow, and we have now spent parts of three years coming back to this town, I want to put down what is worth seeing here while it is fresh enough to be useful.

    Bad Kissingen lies in a valley on the Fränkische Saale, the Franconian Saale, which runs roughly north to south through the middle of it. That single fact shapes nearly everything. Because the town sits low, almost any walk out from the centre means climbing, and some of it climbs steeply. Around the spa quarter, though, the ground is gentle and given over to gardens and parkland, the Kurpark, the Altenberg, the Luitpoldpark and the Rose Garden, a dense green fabric laid out along both banks. The parkland spans the river, and throughout it deck chairs are set out for anyone to use, so that you can take your own patch of shade or sun and simply sit. I have always liked that. It asks nothing of you.

    There is a scented path through the parkland, perhaps two hundred metres of it, that I think of separately from everything else. The roses there are not the formal kind in disciplined beds; they grow looser, wilder, and the scent of them gathers in the still air under the trees until it is almost a weight on you. On a warm afternoon you walk into it before you see it. The perfume reaches you first, heavy and sweet and faintly green at the edges, and for those two hundred metres the ordinary business of the day falls quiet. I have walked it more than once for no reason other than that.

    The formal rose garden, the Rosarium, is a different thing and not to be confused with the path above. It holds something near ten thousand bushes, a hundred and thirty varieties, the colours running from pale yellow through pink to a deep red. It was opened in 1913 and laid out for the townspeople, as against the older spa garden that was once kept for paying guests. Worth a look, but it is the wild path that stays with me.

    The graduation tower, the Gradierwerk, stands in the Luitpold Park and costs nothing to visit. A walkway along the Saale leads up to it. The town owes the structure to its old salt trade, and even now brine trickles down over walls of packed blackthorn brushwood on a great timber frame, throwing off a fine salt mist that is said to do the lungs good, something like the air off the North Sea. The thing that strikes you standing before it is that the whole of it is wood, a tall framework stuffed with thorn, far bigger than you expect. On an earlier visit we sat on the west side with the afternoon sun warm on our backs and the water cooling the air in front of us, breathing that clean salted air, and I came away genuinely persuaded that regular use of it would ease the breathing. I have two photographs I mean to keep with this: one of the whole timber structure in the sun (above), and one from the walkway inside (below), the brine-darkened thorn close at hand and the water running in its channel below. It is the inside shot that carries it.

    The KissSalis Therme took us the better part of a half day. It is a large modern wellness complex, ten pools of various sizes inside and out across some eight thousand square metres, with nine saunas and steam baths besides. The big indoor and outdoor pools are made for families. There are treatment rooms you simply walk into, no booking, where you sit among strangers. Of the several kinds I remember only one clearly, so I will speak only of that: a saline mist room, an indoor and more concentrated cousin of the graduation tower. It was cool and thick with mist, the walls and floor finished in small mosaic tiles, with seats built into the walls, room for about a dozen at most. We stayed a quarter of an hour. On leaving you spray down the spot where you sat for whoever comes next, which is a civilised arrangement. The saunas sit within the textile-free section. Massages are easy to come by, and Ochi and I had a couples one, a head-to-toe thing lying side by side, which was as restful as anything we did all trip. One warning to pass on plainly: do not eat there, or if you must, go in with low hopes. We took dinner at the Therme and it was poor, a cheap set menu and dear for what it was.

    Botenlauben Castle is the ruin we had meant to walk to today. It was the home of Otto von Botenlauben, a minnesinger and crusader, and his wife Beatrix de Courtenay. Otto was a songwriter of some standing, one of those gathered into the Codex Manesse, which I find a strange and pleasing thing to stand near. He sold the castle to the bishopric of Würzburg in 1234, and after that it passed through hands, fell into ruin, and was eventually quarried for its stone, so little is left. Two towers still stand, and you can climb both for a fine view over the town. There is a car park just beneath it for anyone who cannot manage the climb; on foot from the centre it is thirty to forty minutes, and a steep thirty to forty at that. Worth the effort even as a ruin.

    The woodland walks wrap around that side of the town. They are beautiful and quiet and kept scrupulously clean. The tracks are compacted earth, the fire-road sort, with steps cut in where the slope steepens. What I remember is the smell: the resin of the spruce, and under it the damp leaf-litter, sweetish with a cool earthy note beneath, the kind the rain brings up. Birdsong the whole way round. It is as complete a disconnection from city and suburb as I know.

    As for the town itself, it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2021, one of the Great Spa Towns of Europe alongside Bath, Vichy and Baden-Baden among others. Some twenty-two or twenty-three thousand people live here, in Lower Franconia, south-east of the Rhön, a little over two hundred metres up. It is more than twelve hundred years old, first written down around the year 801, with its long history first of salt and later of the mineral-water cures that drew kings and famous names. The Kurgarten dates to 1738 and is reckoned the oldest spa garden of its kind. What I keep coming back to, with the eye of a man presently doing up his own house and garden to sell, is how clean it all is, the houses and gardens kept with a care that shows. It quietly shames the effort I have been putting in at home.

    We drove back and stopped at the local Netto for the journey, and that gave the real surprise of the day. A basket of the ordinary things we would buy at home came to just over forty-four euros. The same shop at our Sainsbury’s would be near sixty pounds, half as dear again, and the German quality every bit as good or better. Large jars of pickled gherkins were one ninety-nine, with all manner of other pickled things going cheaply too. It is the sort of thing that lodges in the mind once you are thinking, as we increasingly are, about how to provision the travelling years ahead.

    A quiet day, then, taken slow on purpose, and none the worse for the rain.

  • 5 June 2026, Kunzmann’s Hotel, Bad Bocklet

    A day with nothing in it that had to be done, which after the long drive and the longer day on the show ground was the whole point of it. Dry and warm, the sky changing its mind every half hour between flat grey and a clean, washed blue. We did not stir early.

    In the late morning we walked out into the parkland, the same ground we had looked down on from the room on the first evening, when no photograph would hold the green. From inside it the green held itself perfectly well. We took about three quarters of an hour over it, an amble rather than a walk, along the gravel paths that thread between the tall spruce and out across the broad lawn, the wooded hills beyond the meadow closing the view in. We did not get as far as the spa quarter, nor did I much want to; the parkland was enough. Bad Bocklet is a spa town, which is what the ‘Bad’ in the name announces before you arrive, a small Bavarian market place of a few thousand people that has held the right to call itself a Markt since long before any of this was here. None of that pressed on the walk. It was simply a quiet town being quiet around us.

    The one piece of practical business was the car. On the way out two days ago, at the first stop, I had noticed the headlight and indicator lens on the SL280 sitting loose in its housing, not falling out but no longer properly held, and I did not want it working itself free somewhere on the autobahn on the way home. So a short trip to a supermarket on the edge of town, a Netto, in search of tape. They had parcel tape and nothing else of any use to me. No duct tape, which is the thing one actually wants for a job like this. I bought the parcel tape and made do.

    Back at the hotel I taped the lens, a stopgap and no more, enough to hold it steady for the run home. It is the sort of repair that looks worse than it is and works better than it looks. I will get the lens off properly once we are home, see whether a clip has gone or the lug has simply tired with age, and either fix it or replace it. The whole small episode left a clear note for the future: there should be a roll of duct tape in the van’s kit before we set off for the travelling years, not bought in a panic at a Netto in a strange town. An old vehicle wants steady small attention, and the things to put it right with ought to be aboard before they are wanted. The SL now, the Sprinter later, the principle is the same.

    Dinner again at a quarter to seven, half board, and this time I wrote the wines down, having let the previous evening’s recommendations slip away unrecorded, which had nagged at me. Both were poured by the glass, the small two-tenths measure. The first was a Jubiläums-Cuvée, a dry white from Weingut Max Müller I at Volkach, classed as a Gutswein, the card promising yellow stone fruit and green apple, juicy, with a lively run of acidity, and delivering more or less what it promised, at seven euros fifty. The second was a Dürkheimer Feuerberg, a Blauer Portugieser, off-dry, from Weinkellerei Langenbach at Trier, ripe-fruited and full with a soft touch of residual sweetness, at seven euros even. No vintage shown on either, which I noticed and let pass.

    The detail that rewarded a second look came afterwards, turning the two names over. The white is a Franconian wine, Volkach lying in Franken, which is as near to a local bottle as the week affords; the red, sold to us in the same breath as a local recommendation, comes by way of a Pfalz house at Trier, which is to say from somewhere else entirely. A ‘local’ wine that turns out to be half from another region is the kind of small slippage I would once have let go by. It grounds the glass in a place to know the difference, rather than leaving it as just a good white and a pleasant red.

    Talk over dinner went back, as it has every evening, to the show: the forty-eight-volt storage, the recirculating shower, the diesel heater, the rest of the list. Nothing settled, nothing decided. We were only turning it over, the way one worries a stone in a pocket without meaning to throw it.