The new window came yesterday and today, motivated by the thunderstorm we may get tomorrow, I was able to scrape together some time after work to put it in.
Off this pops, don’t move it too far because the cable is still connected to the door handle and if you break that you have to crawl through a broken window to get in. You can see that arm is the mechanism for rolling the window up and down. I took the black piece of metal (mounting plate? bracket?) holding it in place off, slid the glass in, put it back on and then realized it has a little hinge that you have to place into that metal slot in the bottom of the glass. I thought I had a picture but apparently not.
Fine enough, just pop off that black metal piece and…. Fuck. It was dark at this point and I thought I’d grabbed my t30 impact socket but apparently that was a safety socket and now the bolt is stripped.
SAFETY CHAT
I don’t give a shit how frustrated you are at how an easy job turned hard or how your glasses are buried in the back of a van or how the babes don’t look at guys wearing safety goggles. WEAR EYE PROTECTION. If you don’t, because you are a stupid jerk then eventually you will be drilling out a stripped bolt and a tiny shard of metal will ricochet into your eye. Hopefully you get lucky and it falls right out and doesn’t scratch the cornea and you can still write posts to all your friends on the internet. But don’t do that. All PPE all the time.
Anyway, as long as I was in there, I added some of my favorite thing. Sound deadener. If nothing else, it makes closing the door more satisfying.
Little MB symbol on the glass so you know it’s
actually just branded freightliner for the US market. All T1Ns were built and assembled entirely in Germany by Mercedes-Benz.
Wait, what’s this? This isn’t a window?!
In a fit of rage I continued to work on the van. And it was good I’d gotten in the mood because I discovered some PO FUCKERY. They’d previously had the radiator replaced and the mechanic who did it did about the job I do when I’m tired and annoyed and told my wife I’d be home two hours ago. This is the intercooler and its attachment point to the condenser. I figured it out all on my own because it sure as fuck hadn’t been connected before.
Nor had they actually bolted the horn back on after undoing it to move it out of the way. Because it was too much effort?
They were also missing two of the four bolts that connect the intercooler to the radiator. The hard to reach one’s obviously. I played fast and loose, using Genuine OEM KTM bolts. They’ll have the added benefit of reducing the van’s weight by .03 grams.
Here you can see the cleverness of the design. The intercooler bolts onto the radiator in four places on the far outside. Then it hooks up to this line with two small screws. On the bottom, it bolts to the condenser and then the top of the condenser bolts to a crosspiece that goes above the radiator.
Last but not least, the fan connects to the van body on the bottom in the front and to that bracket that goes over the condenser. I’ve read a lot about how folks who replace the condenser get rubbing from this fan that rubs a hole in the condenser but I don’t see how. They’re close ish but they definitely in no way touch and they’re both firmly held in place (if you reconnect everything correctly).
As long as we’re here and it’s almost midnight and I have work tomorrow, I might as well check to see, right?
That is vacuum!
And here is ten minutes after disconnecting the vacuum pump!
I’ll go out and check it tomorrow or Friday but it looks like I’ve fixed the catastrophic hole to atmosphere. Next steps are replacing the dryer, vacuuming for an hour or two and then refilling with R134a by weight. The engine also sounds quieter/smoother with everything properly attached too!