Dez' 'fleet' thread. Another bl00dy transit!

Yeah I am aware. The website is identical apart from being a different colour. They don’t actually list the parts I needed though.
I don’t get it at all either.

Well my aux belt kit turned up yesterday, i deferred fitting until today though as the yard was getting a bit of a battering-


A box of new bits. They’re even the same brand as the motor factor ones, INA idlers, dayco tensioner, with a gates belt and all packaged in a gates box.


The way the tensioners work seems overcomplicated at first. It has two tensioners, a manual one and a spring loaded one.
Spring loaded at the top middle.
Manual tensioner below that.
And extra Idler of questionable usefulness at the bottom, actually mounted to the alternator.


I took the wheel off and that brace at front of shot to improve acess. Then I just released tension on the top tensioner by cranking it across with a spanner, and hooked the belt off. Then swapped all 3 pulleys. It’s not hard, just make sure you clean any crud out of the Allen key heads before trying to undo them so the key seats fully home and doesn’t round them off.

The culprit wasn’t actually the spring tensioner as I thought, but the middle tensioner.



The bottom one was also mildly noisy but not as bad. The crank pulley doesnt wobble and has no signs of the rubber falling out so I’m happy with its condition at the moment.

I see so many of these types of tensioner fitted wrongly, so here’s some quick pointers as to how it should work.
When you get the belt back on, what you do is tension the manual tensioner as you would normally for a typical rotating-cam type tensioner. It has a 1/4” square hole in to allow you to hold it with a ratchet or T bar or whatever in the right position whilst you do the bolt up.


Then you pull this pin out of the tensioner. If you’ve got the belt tension right it should come out pretty easily as it should have almost no force on it.


It should just move a tiny little bit to show you havent got the belt too tight, like this.


Then the spring loaded tensioner takes over for the entire life of the belt, making sure it always perfectly tensioned regardless of wear. Clever huh?

This also turned up yesterday.
Smaller than the one that was on, but actually the right one so it’s not wedged in and crushing the cables.
The old one sometimes wouldn’t start it on a cold morning and had to be jumped. The seller was honest about this and knocked me 50 quid off the asking price of the van without me even asking, which was nice. Warmer days it was fine. It was fine all day after that too, but I’m not going to mess about like that when a new one is £44.


It means the clamp also fits properly now too.
I’ve also labelled the battery with when and who I bought it from as it seems all I do recently is replace batteries so I want to make sure if it fails when it’s in warranty I get a freebie replacement.


After that it fired straight up and all whiny/whirry noises are gone, which is most excellent.

So I’ve spent £104 on it and cured all its major mechanical faults. The only things left to attend are making the back door lock work from the outside, stopping the gear knob falling off, and stopping the cat heat shield rattling, which are all secondary concerns. After that It’ll well above normal condition for a 17 year old van, and Pretty damn good for a £600 van.

matfenwick tbh apart from their delivery being a bit sh1t (they insist on still using yodel and I'm yet to have a next day delivery that’s actually next day) they seem pretty alright. I’ve not really had to test their customer service side of things though, I’m mostly buying on price as I rarely keep a car long enough for the warranty to be an issue.

Apologies if you covered this before but what is your target for the fleet trimming exercise?

I look at your list and see a couple of obvious leavers as you have mentioned them already. However, 1-5+8 all seem pretty special and curated to my eyes. So, do some of these go, get consolidated or are they all staying?

Understood, you will have a notional 5-6 core project vehicles and then 2-3 work/modern-ish vehicles.

Makes sense and I fully understand the affliction of filling space.

I did one of them pic collage things to show where I’m currently at. I definitely need better pics of a couple of them!
Only one of these actually works though, so doing something about that needs to be next on the list.




For completeness, here is the other stuff. Bikes don’t count cos they don’t take up a car space, the panda I don’t have a say in wether it stays or not as it’s the mrs. car, and the other two are pragmatic vehicles. If/when they stop being useful (or become too expensive to keep) they’ll go.

That's a lot of weight!

That's a bloody good load! Is this part of the move? Good effort getting shot of a few, must have apace to work/walk/move now! Any progress on the transit?

Was it it lower than that Civic with the slate in you posted once? That was funny. Hada fair bit of soil in the back of mine once and like you say it handled it so well. Not that they are fast but hey don't seem to slow down with weight.