On Sunday I cleaned the van myself, with waterless cleaner and a great heap of rags, there being no water at the storage site. I scrubbed off the dust and the green algae that had crept across the body panels in the damp. The inside needed nothing. It never has. It looked, as it always has, like something just out of the showroom and never lived in.
The drive itself was a hundred and ten miles, up and round to a site near Bedford. The weather was balmy for the time of year, the low twenties and clear. I set off wondering whether I had chosen the right day, the route taking me around roughly half of the M25 (the great orbital motorway that encircles London in a single unbroken ring some hundred and seventeen miles round) from the M23 in the south up to the M1 in the north. I had not chosen well. The north-east quadrant was closed after an accident, so everything heading north had been swung clockwise, all of it piling onto the traffic already going that way. There were long stretches at a dead standstill. The first fifty-five miles, as far as just past Heathrow, took two hours. The second fifty-five, mostly motorway up the M1, took one. The ring road’s average speed is about twenty-five miles an hour against a seventy limit, so the whole hundred-and-seventeen-mile loop takes some five hours to drive round, and my morning sat squarely on that dismal figure.
Three things stood out from the crawl. The first was an aircraft. As I passed Heathrow a large jet lifted off and crossed more or less overhead, perhaps a couple of hundred metres up, the sound of it deep and thundering through the cab. A long-haul twin of that size, a 777 sort of thing rather than the very largest, leaves the ground at something in the region of two hundred and fifty to three hundred tonnes. A few hundred tonnes held aloft because the air moves a little faster over the top of the wing than beneath it. I sat in stationary traffic and thought about that for a while, the plain physics of it, which is no less of a marvel for being explicable.
The second was the road as memory. I drove this exact stretch, south to north, as a daily commute about thirty years ago, home near Gatwick to work in Kings Langley, the very same morning run I was making today. Around eighteen months of it, when I was accountant for a car sales firm. Back then they were widening the motorway from three lanes to four, and five in places. I am genuinely not sure how I managed it. We are far more resilient when we are young, and have less sense of what we are spending. There is a small irony in it, the road enlarged all those years to carry ever more traffic, and here it was today at a complete stop.
The third was the police. At two separate points on the M25, an unmarked car threaded through the stationary lanes with its blue lights going, one a BMW M3, the other a hot version of a VW Golf. Both looked exactly like the cars you would expect to belong to someone with rather grand ideas of themselves: heavily tinted, immaculate, sitting on big wheels, built to the eye for a lap of the Nürburgring rather than for police work. How convincingly disguised these things have become struck me each time, two cars I would never have looked at twice until the lights came on.
I reached the auction site, did the paperwork, took an Uber to Bedford station and the Thameslink home, about two and a half hours of trains. The auction follows next week.
There is a symmetry to the day I cannot ignore, a van bought to cross the world yet scarcely driven before being given up, and given up along the very road I knew intimately three decades back. What is most honest to record, though, is how little I felt as I handed it over. I never bonded with it. I want to be fair: it is not a bad van. It is a genuinely good example, everything working as it should, every control precise and clean. But it always felt like just a van, and nothing ever formed between us. The contrast is with Morrison, which has real character, a more physical thing to drive, noisier, harsher, given to wallowing on its great tyres and raised suspension. You always know when you have driven Morrison. Today I drove a hundred and ten miles to part with a vehicle I had owned for two years, and felt no pang at all, and that absence is the truest thing I can set down about the day.
The mileage tells the truth more plainly than I could. A hundred and twenty-one thousand when I bought it; a hundred and twenty-two now. A thousand miles in just under three years, and a good chunk of those will be today.
I brought it home on the first of July, near enough two years ago, in the same state of excitement I had carried back from Germany. It promptly took over the driveway. It blocked the garage, made a nuisance of itself for ordinary daily use, and stood there far larger than the life around it. I measured the whole chassis end to end and built it up in CAD, and then arranged storage elsewhere simply to have our drive back.
After that I kept at the CAD in the evenings, working through the habitation box, how it might mount, how the living space would divide. The mounting was the part that weighed most. A ladder-frame truck chassis is meant to flex and twist along its length as the wheels ride over rough ground; that is not a fault, it is the design working. Bolt a rigid box straight onto a frame that moves like that and it will tear at its fixings or crack apart over a season or two. The accepted answer is a torsion-free subframe, often a three-point arrangement, which lets the chassis twist beneath the box while the box stays largely unstressed. I spent a great many evenings turning that problem over, and part of why getting it right felt so heavy was that there is no casual version of it.
And yet it never felt right. I could not have told you why. I would go back to the model, move things about, and never once arrive at the quiet certainty of that’s the one. Time passed. The van sat in the storage compound gathering dust, out of sight and, soon enough, out of mind. I had to put it through its MOT twice and have it serviced once over those years, and even those small duties were awkward. At over three and a half tonnes the thing counts as a heavy goods vehicle, so it needs a specialist MOT test station, and there are few of those, generally booked weeks ahead. Servicing was easier in principle, since any garage may service it, but at close to nine metres long very few garages would take it through their doors.
Two things slowly changed my mind, though I did not feel them as a turning at the time. At Allrad in 2025, our second visit, we went round deliberately looking at the smaller vehicles and at the Bruder off-road caravans, asking ourselves what we genuinely needed and how little space it might actually take. Then, later in 2025, we spent a fortnight in a small coach-built camper in Portugal, and we came away thinking that even that had been larger than we needed, given a bit of discipline in the planning. That was the start of the search for the new vehicle, the one we now call Morrison. The dropside, meanwhile, went on sitting unused, immaculate inside because it had never once been put to any purpose.
What finally moved it was not a fresh insight. It was the insurance and tax coming up for renewal. That administrative nudge brought the van back to mind, and I decided there and then to enter it into a commercial auction, which takes place next week.
I have been turning over what to take from all this. The honest version is unflattering. A vehicle bought to cross the world covered about a thousand miles in two years, sat in a compound, and quietly cost me specialist test bookings, the hunt for a garage long enough, and tax and insurance ticking over month after month for a thing I never saw. The deeper lesson is the one about being out of sight. Once it was stored away the problem stopped nagging at me, but it did not go away; it simply persisted, unsolved, for years. The right order of priorities would have had me face the thing that plainly was not working, rather than let distance and inertia decide it for me. I named the conflict only in hindsight, that pull between a big box built for developed-world comfort and a wish to go light and far, and even now I hold the naming of it loosely.
The van (not Morrison) went off to auction today, and the drive up gave me the better part of three hours to think about how I came to own it at all. So I will set the beginning down first, while the whole shape of the thing is in my head.
It began, properly, more than two years before I ever bought a vehicle. There was a plan, an overland tour that would take us right across the world, and for a long time it lived only as reading, calculation and argument with myself and then discussed with Ochi. Then in 2024 we went for the first time to Abenteuer & Allrad at Bad Kissingen, the great off-road and expedition gathering, around two hundred and fifty exhibitors spread across the ground with everything from roof tents and cookers to vehicles the size of small houses. We gave it two and a half days. We climbed inside as many builds as would let us, talked to the people who make them, and learned more in those few days than in the previous year of reading.
The spread of what was there has stayed with me. At the modest end, Toyota pickups carrying a compact living box on the back, or Ineos Grenadiers fitted out with storage, a few pull-out fittings and a roof tent. At the other, six-wheeled all-wheel-drive monsters with four-wheel steering, twenty tonnes and more, and a handful of eight-wheeled things that looked built to cross a continent without noticing it was there. Walking between the two extremes did most of our deciding for us.
I came home full of it and went straight to the classifieds. Within a short while I had found what looked ideal: a one-owner 2016 Sprinter 516 dropside, extra-long wheelbase, full service history, a hundred and twenty-one thousand miles on it. I bought it.
The design brief in my head was by then quite firm. We did not want one of the fifteen-tonne-plus luxury expedition trucks. They are magnificent, but we wanted to take narrow mountain passes as well as open country, and I wanted to be able to mend the thing myself in a field if it came to that. Changing a wheel on one of the giants means wrestling something close to or over a hundred kilograms; a single military-pattern tyre, a 395/85 R20, is around ninety-five to a hundred kilograms before you even add the rim. That just did not seem like any fun at the roadside in the middle of nowhere. So I set a ceiling of seven and a half tonnes and meant to stay under it.
Against that, we wanted the comforts of home, and comfort costs both volume and weight. I had a target habitation box of roughly five and a half metres by two point two by two point two, divided properly into kitchen, shower room, bedroom and living room, with a garage at the back for bicycles, spares and tools. A washing machine. Air conditioning. Working from those, I reckoned on at least two hundred and fifty litres of water, the washing machine being a thirsty thing, and around fifteen kilowatt-hours of stored energy. The box itself I meant to build in composite throughout, carbon fibre and glass fibre according to where each belonged, and bring in at about two to two and a half tonnes.
The dropside made sense for a reason that seemed obvious once I had it. A dropside body is the easiest of all to strip away, leaving the chassis clean and exposed for a separate habitation box to be mounted on it. The extra-long wheelbase I chose simply because, at the time, I thought we needed a large box to live in.
On paper it was coherent. I had thought it through honestly and the numbers held together. Sitting here now, I can see the seed of the later trouble sitting quietly inside that coherence: a big box, sized for living the way one lives in a comfortable house, set against a wish to travel light and travel far. I did not see it then. I see it now, though I am not yet sure I have fully made my peace with it.
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.
The transaction with Rory is complete, the keys have been handed over, and the vehicle is officially ours. Naturally, the euphoria of procurement was immediately tempered by the reality of the task at hand: the one hundred and thirty-mile transit to bring Morrison home.
We were acutely aware during the initial test drive that the turbocharger was singing its swan song. It wasn’t yet making any truly catastrophic noises, so we took a calculated risk to limp it home. The journey was, to put it mildly, sedate. The single carriageway sections of the A303 provided their usual bottleneck, and given our reluctance to push the engine, I fear we may have been the architects of some significant tailbacks. If you were stuck behind a rather tentative-looking campervan recently, do accept my humblest apologies.
It was during this long, slow procession that I had ample time to acquaint myself with the vehicle’s idiosyncrasies. I noted a distinct vagueness in the steering; play that felt beyond the usual character of such a machine. Then, to add a dash of adrenaline to the final leg, as we navigated the exit slip off the M25, the side door decided to liberate itself from the latch mechanism, sliding open entirely of its own accord. A spirited end to the journey, indeed.
Safely back at headquarters, I have been able to conduct a proper post-mortem.
Upon turning the key now, the turbo has developed a decided rattle. To prevent the impeller shattering and feeding metal shards into the engine, replacing this unit has become the highest priority. The vehicle shall remain grounded until this is rectified. The turbo was replaced only 8,000 miles ago, which, I think points the finger squarely at oil starvation. Consequently, I shall be examining the oil feed and return lines to ensure we do not find ourselves in this position again.
The steering diagnosis proved slightly less grim. While oversized tyres invariably place undue stress on steering components, the issue does not appear to be the universal joint on the lower column (which was replaced relatively recently). Rather, the play seems to stem from a missing grommet where the column passes through the bulkhead. A simple fix, one hopes.
Finally, the self-opening door. The diagnosis is straightforward, worn runners, but the remedy is less so. Accessing the mechanism requires the removal of the entire kitchen unit. While this turns a small job into a significant project, it is a blessing in disguise; stripping the interior will allow me to properly assess the condition of the internal metalwork.
These three items: the turbo, the steering, and the great interior strip-down will form the basis of our next few entries. The real work begins now.
Taking the keys to a legend is a heavy responsibility. When a vehicle has crossed the Sahara, navigated the Skeleton Coast, and clocked over 25 years of history, it stops being just a collection of metal and rubber. It becomes an archive of memories. We are Jason and Ochi, and we are the new custodians of Morrison.
First and foremost, we want to send a massive thank you to Rory and Lucy. For a quarter of a century, they didn’t just drive this custom Iglhaut beast; they gave it a life. They proved that this van was built for the extraordinary, pushing it through revolutions, deserts, and 18 countries on a single run. We wish them nothing but fair winds and open roads in their future adventures. They have set a high bar for stewardship, and we intend to honour that legacy.
But every great adventurer needs a moment to catch their breath, and Morrison has been resting for a little while.
While the bones of this machine, the permanent 4-wheel drive, the diff locks, and that indomitable off-road suspension, are as solid as ever, the world of overlanding has evolved, and so too must the van. Our immediate goal isn’t just to drive it, but to recondition and retrofit it.
The next few months on this blog won’t be about travel destinations, but about transformation. We are stripping things back to ensure Morrison is robust, reliable, and ready for the modern era. We plan to modernise the systems and inject a new level of comfort into the living quarters, ensuring that when the wheels finally turn in anger again, this van is ready for any corner of the globe we point it toward.
We might be the ones holding the steering wheel and turning the wrenches, but this story belongs to the van. We are just here to make sure it’s ready for the next 100,000 miles.
The van has been sold and after a bit of TLC and some reconfiguration to cary a couple of bikes she will be off again.. watch this space to follow the next adventure.
Well after over 25 years of fun and adventure Morrison (the van ..get it… Van Morrison!) is for sale.The full specs are on the about the van page. We had a reconditioned engine and turbo after our second crossing of the Sahara (about 10,000 miles ago).
This vehicle is a custom made Iglehaut specialist off road vehicle Permanent 4 wheel drive High and low ratio gearbox front, center and rear diffs Off road suspension (lateral leaf springs)
All the usual kit inside: Proper 4 burner hob and grill 2 fridges, one with small freezer loo 2 showers (one inside and one outside) Large roof mounted solar panel 240 volt inverter, power throughout swivel seats pull out double bed with storage under. large awning Water purifying system.
Turkey this Autumn, the plan is to drive through France,Germany.Austria,Slovenia, Bosnia and down the Adriatic Coast to cross into Turkey at the Canakkale Bridge. We will then drive to Datca leave the van there and fly home. Restarting in January 2024.
New engine, beefed up hydraulic winch and a bit of TLC, We decided to leave the dents….. we don’t want any “mutton dressed as lamb” jokes.
We are off to live in Africa and will be based in Nairobi.
