I got the van back last week from the automotive shop. They stated that they had to replace the resistor as well as a "main-function relay" to get the blower motor working properly. As for having the A/C checked out, the condenser is completely missing, having been cut out by a past owner. My girlfriend and I are exploring different routes for that, but that's a whole other thread. The blower motor does work now though!

My girlfriend and I also drove to Kentucky yesterday to pick up some FlexSteel seats on swivel bases to replace the front seats in the van. I'm not sure if we will be recovering them or just using some seat covers for now, but i guess they recline, swivel, and also have a rocking feature. While picking them up, i also managed to snag a rear tire carrier off of the sellers parts van for $10! I'll be painting and installing that shortly.

 

Work on the van has been pretty slow going. It's been hot and I have a few other cars that I'm working on as well. This weekend I managed to get the chance though to pick up 2 free rims and tires. The tires are wasted, but i think the rims will work for a spare. Over the past couple weeks, my girlfriend and I also broke down the rear spare tire carrier and painted it and put it back together.

My brother came down on Saturday to help me with one of the cars I'm rebuilding and I managed to get him to help me work on the van as well. I recently purchased aftermarket gauges and a thermostat housing with a sending port built into it to monitor the coolant temperature. My brother installed the gauges inside the cab while i worked on the thermostat housing. Sadly, this resulted in breaking a bolt on the lower portion of it that I now have to heat up to get it out. I bought a special tool at Autozone that will hopefully work.

On Sunday, my brother helped me get the rear hitch out with his Jeep Liberty. After some heat, hitting it with a sledge, we attached it to my brothers hitch with a very short bit of chain, around 3 foot. I draped a heavy moving blanket over it folded up a few times, and after maybe 10 yanks on the hitch with the Jeep, it finally came loose in a safe controlled fashion. I was very excited for that. I've also been brainstorming how to layout the interior, and i've been googling how to clear the drains in the front fenders. Currently the floor on the driver and passenger sides are wet after it rains. Any ideas?

 

If you have access to a welder, here's what I do with those. I find a nut that will fit over the broken bolt, not thread on just fit over. Then weld up the inside of the nut. So it welds onto the broken bolt. This does a couple things. First it puts a decent amount of heat into it to hopefully help break it free. Second it gives you a new bolt head, to put a wrench or socket on. This helps apply more force then anything trying to grip onto the threads.

Now it may take a time or two of doing this but I've had good success doing this.

 

Thanks, i've been thinking of just going that route instead of attempting to use the tool. It seems like it'll kill 2 birds with 1 stone by heating it up and allowing me the best position to be able to turn it.

 

This weekend I took apart the front end of the van in order to remove the broken thermostat housing bolt. The tool that I purchased worked like a charm! A question though, is that cooler in front of the radiator, the transmission cooler?

 

Yes the little cooler in front of the rad is for the trans. One thing I'll mention, the sensor visible in the vertical stub pipe just beside the distributor is the water temp sensor for the computer, the dash gauge has it's own sensor near #5 injector on the drivers side of the lower intake. This sensor is a simple 1 wire thing about the size of a dime, a loose/corroded connection is common with these or if the PO has replaced this at some point and applied too much thread sealer it won't work as the sensor needs to ground through the intake.

 

Well, it's been a bit since I've updated this.

The van has finally been reassembled. I abandoned the aftermarket gauges for the moment and fixed the temperature dash gauge. I stopped the leaking coming in through the hole in the firewall, i hope.

With a camping trip coming up this weekend, I drove my van to my hometown and convinced my brother to give me a hand slapping together some 2x4s and OSB.

 

 

Over the last month my girlfriend and I found a matching original set of captains chairs on swivels for an incredibly reasonable price. We bought those, sold our old swivels.

This last weekend, we took the van camping in Northern Indiana. We arrived late at night right before Check-In closed at 11. Then we proceeded to install the curtains my girlfriend had spent all day sewing. We used twine temporarily. The trip was a great first run of the set up and definitely showed us some downfalls of our current set up. Being 6'2" and having 2 people in the van, we definitely need to work on the sleeping platform and storage. It was rather chaotic. The van drove wonderfully though, Ashton (our dog) enjoyed the trip, Kailey (my girlfriend) slept like a baby and even took over driving duties on the way home.

I still need to get the cruise control figured out!

 

Nice seats! Those are what's in my 89 Club Wagon. Mine have the standard bases not the swivel ones though.

 

Sadly, i attempted to install them but they're from the middle section, so the holes don't line up in the front. I'm going to drill new holes through the metal bases. The guy who sold them to us, pulled them out of his van 15 years ago, covered them in plastic in his shed and pulled them out and put them on the Facebook marketplace for super cheap.

 

Yea, just drill new holes. Or use a piece of steel plate ( larger then the seat base ) as a adapter if you can't just drill new holes in the seat base itself.

They look like they are in great shape.

 

I haven't updated this build thread for quite some time. I mostly post on Expedition Portal, but I have some free time at work, so I thought i'd post up some pictures of what's been going on with the van.

In November, my girlfriend and I used the van to tow my 1974 Super Beetle to my grandmothers house, which is now my mother's house. It's tucked away in the garage waiting for the engine rebuild.



After that, I replaced the original radiator with a new aluminum one, I replaced the transmission cooler with a heavy duty one, and did a full tune up on her. New plugs, wires, cap, rotor, temperature sensor.




During my mother's move to our grandmothers, the van came in handy! The pictures of the van clean and then covered in snow is 1 week apart. Thank you, Indiana!






Well, I posted the van for sale last week while looking at a 1989 Dodge B2500 with a 318 that was already a Conversion Van. I posted it to quite a few van pages on Facebook and had a guy hit me up telling me that he was the one who saved my van from the scrap yard. Apparently, the van belonged to a diehard Ford guy who used it to tow. He pulled it apart to replace the water pump, broke a few bolts off in the process, left the van to sit, then died. His son didn't know what to do with the van, so he finally sold it to this guy that I've been talking with. I managed to get some pictures of it when it was saved!










Now I know of it's past 4 owners, 3 of them are Facebook friends, which is kind of cool when diagnosing an issue with the van, though they may not think so. In the pictures, the van is in Pennsylvania, then it was traded to a member of a Van Club for a Conversion van, and that's how it ended up in Ohio. Then in Ohio, it was traded to a kid in Indiana for a 1978 Ford F100.

I took it off the marketplace as the van I was looking at, sold. I spent all day yesterday driving it, helped a buddy pick up a 1.8l engine for his Volkswagen Cabriolet, then i spent the evening working on it, and generally realized how good of a van she is. I bought a code reader for the OBD1 system and pulled the codes, which are:

122 - Throttle Position Sensor below minimum voltage
621 - Shift Solenoid #1 Circuit Fault
622 - Shift Solenoid #2 Circuit Fault
624 - Electronic Pressure Control Solenoid Circuit Fault
626 - Coast Clutch Solenoid Circuit Fault
629 - Converter Clutch Solenoid Circuit Fault or Lock Up Solenoid Circuit Fault
637 - Transmission Oil Temperature Circuit Above Maximum Voltage
654 - Not in Park During KOEO Test

I was originally trying to count light flashes, but as you can see, there are a TON of codes.

I removed the 80's wooden cup holders because they don't work worth a ****, and installed a cup holder that is usually wedged between a seat and a center console, with screws to the dog house. It looks and works so much better, personally.

 

A bit late to your thread here Jake---good progress so far, glad you're enjoying your van.

FWIW I'm in the auto/truck glass biz and would highly advise you to try finding replacement glass for those behind the front doors. If they need replaced finding them new is very difficult unless we search under a "classic" designation. Naturally that runs the price quite high due their age or late date of regular production.

The good news is those rear pieces tend to be laminated glass, much like the windshield when they break it doesn't fall out in a million pieces as would tempered parts.

Anyway keep up the good work!

 

Are you referring to broken windows? Or? I apologize, I'm confused. The windows in mine are all in good condition.