What all has broken down on our journey? I'll only write about what stopped working after we hit the road, not during the conversion... even so, it's been more than enough.

Before every drive, we check the basic fluids in the engine.

One of the first things that stopped working properly on our engine was the cooling fan. The risk is that under load, the engine doesn't cool well and eventually overheats. And that almost happened to us. Well, it did happen to us, but we just stopped and waited for the coolant to cool down, so it didn't have any terrible consequences. Anyone who read about our first week on the road knows about this. The repair went through several phases. First we just stuck a bolt between the fan and the pulley and taped it with duct tape, so the fan was spinning at full speed all the time. It was good for hills, but otherwise we couldn't even warm up the engine properly, which isn't ideal for diesels...

The fan on our van engages electrically. At first it spins slowly, and when needed, it kicks in and really gets going. The thermostat is supposed to control it, but ours doesn't work either, hence this whole problem. When that little bolt fell out and it looked like another disaster on our way uphill, Leo came up with a solution. He connected the cable from the headlights to the cable that powers the fan, so now when we have the lights on, the fan runs, and when the lights are off, it doesn't spin. This trick works well – you're supposed to drive with lights on during the day anyway. And it's good because when we want to warm up the engine a bit, we just turn off the lights. We could have wired it directly into the cabin, but at that moment we didn't have a long enough cable on hand. So far it hasn't let us down, so we'll see how we manage with it going forward.

For the ladies – this is what it looks like under the hood.

We're constantly trying to find the right balance between smoking and performance. With old diesel engines, it's normal for them to smoke a little – imagine an old bus. Well, our Iveco has a similar engine. But what you'll definitely also remember is that they don't have much power, which we didn't like. Fortunately, the previous owner already tweaked the fuel pump a bit, boosting the power – it's handy for hills and highways. But unfortunately, the consequence is that it smokes a bit more. So we're actively working on it, changing oil and all possible filters. We've achieved about 70% improvement! And the power has also increased! And as a bonus, our Iveco makes beautiful satisfied chugging sounds! :D

The turbo, well... for a girl, it's kind of an imaginary thing in the engine. Not for me anymore. :D When your van suddenly stops climbing hills and even when you floor the pedal and nothing happens, you break a bit of a sweat. I didn't notice it, but Leo suddenly went kind of pale. So we stopped and went to take apart another piece of the engine. Apparently a seized turbo. And that's supposedly expensive. When Leo got to it, it somehow turned and wasn't seized anymore... the harder part was putting it back. He loosened half the bolts on it, so just to be safe, we bought some turbo sealant to plug it up. When we mounted it back, the next challenge was somehow getting oil into it. Normally this is apparently done with a syringe. But we don't carry one with us. So by various methods we finally got about 3 drops of oil in there and spilled everything around it in the process... So we had no choice but to try starting it and hope it wouldn't seize before the oil got in there. And it worked!

The radiator story is in previous posts – it was tense, but we somehow patched it together. It's still working for now, we can only hope it lasts a while.

Every time the van starts making a new sound, we break a sweat, turn off the music, and listen to figure out where it's coming from. If it doesn't stop, we pull over and check everything just to be safe. This approach has worked well for us so far and we've already covered about 3000 km. So keep your fingers crossed that our Iveco holds up and we can explore more of the world! :)