Why the rattlevan can’t go uphill

I’ve waxed romantic in previous posts here and here about car mechanics and shops on our trip.  I love the idea of places where they make do with limited resources and people learn to make things work by doing.  This is expressed well in a taller mechanico.  We’ve had good work done inexpensively and quickly, so when I left to go to LA for a short trip, we expected the laundry list of car fixes to get done in the 2 weeks we left the car with a mechanic.  It was a rustic shop but came with an older mechanic who’s probably wrenched his way around thousands of old Toyotas in his time.  The problems that the rattlevan had were not serious ones, but we figured that while we weren’t using it, it would be a great time to tune some things up and make it a finely tuned rattlebeast.  It wasn’t to be. 

While our mechanic did accomplish two of the things that we needed (installing airbags to beef up our sagging suspension and welding our bumper back on), he didn’t fix other things and even managed to introduce a couple of new zinger problems.

We picked the rattlevan up after I returned, and I got it all ready for a trip up to Lake Atitlan with Beth’s parents. I was pretty excited because the airbags that we placed in the suspension gave the rattlevan a brand new stature.  We now sport a stout suspension with all the ground clearance we need for the crazy roads down here.  Plus, it’s now adjustable.  If I want more clearance, I can just add air and for a softer ride, let some out.  I was also excited to have a bumper attached with metal instead of ropes.

Beth’s parents wanted to ride along to get a first-hand taste of life in the rattlevan so we all loaded up and set off on an adventure – it went epic on the first hill we hit.  Leaving Jocotenango, we rounded a bend and pointed uphill with gusto.  That was when the rattlevan sputtered and died right in the road and when Beth’s dad provided the unnerving backseat status report: “There’s fluid coming out all over the road!” The fluid was gas and the poor rattlevan was hemorrhaging it. We sprang into action and enacted “emergency chicken bus crash avoidance plan.”  Beth jumped out to warn any oncoming chicken buses of our situation and when she couldn’t find our planned “fluorescent baggies emergency flag,” she improvised with a bright orange thermarest sleep pad.  The parents offloaded, I grabbed the fire extinguisher (just in case things got even more epic), and Beth saved our asses from oncoming demons.  A helpful neighbor saw the gringos in distress and chipped in by quickly cutting several large branches with his machete and placing them in the road.  This is a typical warning system that while not as bright (or fun) as fluorescent baggies and sleep pads, is more recognizable to drivers as “problems ahead, slow your roll.”  The van would only head uphill in fits so we had to turn around on the narrow, blind turn.  With the help of locals, we made it, and the van drove fine down hill. 

Regrouping at the bottom, we decided it best for me to take the van back to the shop (without passengers in case of further epic events possibly involving a gasoline drenched van and risk of fire. Which, come to think of it, would sure make an exciting blog post. I guess we would’ve been too panicked to shoot video, so in the end it wouldn’t have been worth it).  Beth gave her parents an impromptu tour of what it’s like to ride in a chicken bus (despite my reservations) and they arrived to meet me at the car shop without incident.

We, quite reasonably I think, diagnosed the uphill stall as some sort of vapor lock in the gas line due the torrential outflow of gas from the tank.  The tank had a large crack in it due to the bright idea of Sunrader Corp. placing heavy cabin supports in close contact with the tank.  While underneath the van, getting high on gas fumes, I found something that made the whole incident a good thing.  The transmission was leaking almost as much fluid as the gas tank was.  You don’t have to be a car geek to know that a dry transmission is a very, very bad thing.  We probably wouldn’t have made it more than 100 kilometers down the road before gears started melting and we found ourselves with a desperate need for new transmission.  Apparently, when the mechanic installed our new clutch, he made some sort of mistake that left our transmission way less than the tightly sealed container it should have been.  We would never have known if we didn’t spring a gas leak. 
While the mechanic sealed the crack and lowered the tank to clear the support and revisited his botched clutch job, Beth sent her parents onward to the lake sans tour guide.  We planned to join them the next day in the van.  We didn’t. The mechanic took this opportunity to also revisit some exhaust work that he didn’t complete before which resulted in yet another delay so Beth went on to the lake without me.  I planned to join the group the next day.   I didn’t.  The mechanic waited to start more work until I was there to loom over him, and as a result, I couldn’t leave either.  Grrr.

Finally, Beth returned and the van was out of the shop, so we planned our final departure from Antigua.  We found a convenient (and safe) hill to test out the uphill stall problem to see if it was gone.  It wasn’t.



The same thing happened.  This time without the gushing gas. Hmmm. So it wasn’t vapor lock.  I dug into the other likely suspect – the vacuum system.  What I found was quite disturbing.  Our mechanic had rerouted several of the vacuum hoses more to his tastes and apparently without using the vacuum hose diagram conveniently located under the hood.  I dug into the complex maze of hoses that make up what is essentially a logic and control system for the engine and is pretty much what your car’s computer now handles.  You now need a special device to diagnose these sorts of problems, but at least you don’t need three cups of coffee, a meticulous sense of detail and tiny little fingers on the ends of your fingers.   Several hours later, I returned the vacuum system to the specifications that the engineers at Toyota intended and was enthusiastic about tackling the hill again to see if we could make it up.  We couldn’t. 

Back down the hill, I popped the hood, scratched my head a lot and spent more time trying to figure out how we could find a very good, highly trained mechanic in this town than solving any problems.  My only thought was to ask a VW mechanic I met a couple of weeks back if he knew of someone who was a Toyota expert.  Although I’ve seen him around town in his cool vintage VW van, I didn’t know where to find him.  He found me.  As I was scratching my head and thumbing through both of my repair manuals for inspiration, the VW mechanic tapped me on my shoulder.  He was just cruising by when he saw the hood up and stopped to see what was up.  I grunted-and-pointed my description of the problem and psychically communicated my need for a mechanico muy bueno.  With no hesitation, the VW guy directed me to a nearby gas station which, he promised, had an excellent mechanic.  An excellent mechanic who, as it turns out, speaks English.  (I almost hugged the dude.)  I gave the new mechanic a complete rundown in even more boring detail than above and requested several tests (fuel pressure check, vacuum system routing and leak tests, etc.).  He understood everything and is (I hope) now hard at work solving the problem introduced by our other mechanic.  

This whole experience was quite discouraging.  It’s not that we came down here in a 1981 van not expecting to have any problems.  We knew we would encounter some.  We’ve just had such great luck with mechanics and with our ride and I guess we kind of got used to it.  Now we’ve lost some faith in the rattlevan (don’t tell her) and in mechanics.  Car shops down here just aren’t that different than those in the US.  Some are good and some are bad.  It all makes us a little more nervous about going to some of the more out-of-the-way places. 

The thing is, that despite this little problem of the van not being able to go up any hills, she’s running pretty great.  The suspension is solid, the exhaust now purrs and that weird embarrassing honking sound that we used to sport is gone.  Hopefully, our new mechanic can sort out the hill problem and we will finally be on our way somewhere (though we’re still not sure where that might be). 

[For you technical types and car nerds:  The truck is equipped with a new mechanical fuel pump, a new fuel filter, a relatively new air filter that’s not too dirty, it’s carbureted, and has a vacuum advance system.  When the hoses were misrouted, I noticed oil in the air filter due to a problem with positive crankcase ventilation but that no longer is a problem. Even before we went to this mechanic, we’ve been experiencing increasing throttle hesitation during acceleration and slow, cold starts.  Also, performance seems weaker than when we first started the trip.  The air mixture screw on the carburetor has been adjusted by feel and not by specifications and the exhaust has always smelled a little rich.  The timing is the same as it was when I set it at the beginning of the trip and seems fine.  I think that there’s either a problem with vacuum triggering extra air and advancing the timing under load (the vacuum advance does seem to work manually) or with fuel delivery despite the new pump (it does seem to be hooked up right).]