The Van!

The Van Plan

  • The Turbo – A Rattle and a Riddle

    If you’ve been following along, you’ll remember that back in the maiden voyage post I mentioned, almost in passing, that the turbo needed some attention. I left it there at the time, a loose thread to be picked up later. Well, later has arrived, and as it turns out that loose thread unravelled into something rather larger than I’d bargained for.

    Before I go further: if you’ve never been entirely sure what a turbocharger actually is, or why a part the size of your fist can cause this much trouble and fascination in equal measure, I’ve written a separate page explaining the whole thing from first principles. It’s genuinely one of the most elegant pieces of engineering on the van. It makes power out of the engine’s own waste, and the rest of this story makes far more sense if you’ve read it. You’ll find it here: [The Turbo]. Go on, have a look. I’ll wait.

    The two symptoms

    The trouble announced itself in two ways.

    The first I’d felt for most of the long drive home: the power was simply lacking. Not dramatically, not a breakdown-on-the-hard-shoulder sort of problem, but a persistent sense that Morrison was working harder than he should to do less than he ought. On the flat you’d not notice. On a long climb, fully loaded, you noticed.

    The second was harder to ignore, and it arrived once we were home: a rattle. A distinct, mechanical rattle coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the turbo. Now, a rattle near a part that spins faster than anything else on the vehicle, floating on a thin film of oil, is the kind of sound that gets your full attention rather quickly. My mind went straight to the worst case: something loose, something failing, metal somewhere it shouldn’t be. There was nothing for it but to take the turbo off and have a proper look.

    Getting the thing out

    This is where the fun started, and I use the word “fun” in the way only someone who has since recovered from the experience can.

    Two of the bolts holding the turbo in place were, to put it generously, thoughtfully positioned, which is to say almost impossible to reach. Getting to them meant first removing a whole cluster of other components around the exhaust side of the engine, none of which had anything wrong with them and all of which simply happened to be in the way. So off they came.

    Then remove all the turbo connections in the usual order: the air feed, the charged-air pipe, the oil feed and the oil drain. Then next the turbo’s exhaust outlet had to be disconnected, and that meant going underneath the van to loosen the bolts securing the exhaust itself. And here I found something odd: those bolts were loose already. Properly loose. I noted them as a job to put right on reassembly, and carried on.

    Finally, with the exhaust freed, it was a simple matter of removing the turbo mount. And with that, hey presto, the turbo was out and on the bench.

    The good news, and the real mystery

    The first inspection was reassuring. The turbine, the compressor wheel and the shaft joining them were all in good order. No damage to the blades, no scoring, and crucially no untoward movement in the shaft, no play or wobble that would have spelled worn bearings. The heart of the turbo was healthy.

    And that is when the penny finally dropped about the rattle. If the turbo’s insides were sound, then the noise had never been coming from the turbo at all. It was those loose exhaust bolts, the exhaust knocking about because its fixings had worked their way loose, throwing a sound up into the engine bay that, for all the world, had seemed to be coming from the turbo. One of my two problems, solved almost by accident, and nowhere near where I’d been looking.

    So if the spinning parts were fine, why the missing power? For that, I had to look at the part of the turbo that controls it.

    The clever bit: how a turbo knows when to work

    The separate page touches on this, but it’s worth spelling out here, because it’s central to the whole story.

    A turbo doesn’t want to be making full boost all the time. At low engine speeds there’s barely any exhaust to drive it, and the moment a driver lifts off the throttle you want it to stop forcing air in, and stop quickly. So a modern turbo like Morrison’s is a cleverer thing than a simple fixed device: it adjusts itself, moment to moment, while the engine runs.

    The way it manages this is rather beautiful. Inside the exhaust housing, ringed around the turbine, sits a set of small movable fins, or vanes. By changing their angle, the turbo changes how the exhaust gas is aimed at the turbine. Close the fins down and the gas is funnelled through narrow gaps, speeding up and hitting the turbine hard, giving lots of boost even at low engine speed. Open them up and the gas flows past gently, giving little boost but instant response when you back off. It’s the same trick as putting your thumb over the end of a hose to make the water shoot further.

    Something has to move those fins, and that something is the actuator, the black unit you can see mounted on the middle of the turbo. The actuator, in turn, doesn’t run on electricity or oil pressure but on vacuum: gentle suction, drawn from the engine, that pulls a diaphragm inside the actuator and moves a rod connected to the fins. The more vacuum applied, the further the rod travels and the more the fins move.

    Of course, vacuum on its own is just vacuum, and it needs to be metered out precisely. That’s the job of a small electronic valve called a transducer (you may also see it called a boost-pressure solenoid or an electro-pneumatic converter, same idea). The engine’s computer tells the transducer how much vacuum to pass through to the actuator at any given instant, and so, indirectly, the computer commands the fins. Brain, to valve, to vacuum, to rod, to fins. That’s the chain.

    Where it had all gone wrong

    Now to the interesting part.

    That actuator is supposed to begin moving the rod at a fairly modest vacuum, somewhere around 150 mmHg, and to reach the end of its travel by around 420 mmHg. That’s the window the engine’s computer is designed to work within, and I’d tracked down a technical document for the actuator that confirmed those figures.

    But when I tested Morrison’s, the actuator wasn’t starting to move until around 400 mmHg, and wasn’t reaching full travel until something like 700. In other words, the whole operating window had been shifted far out of reach. The vanes weren’t even beginning to close until the vacuum was already up where they should have been very nearly fully deployed. The computer was asking for boost in its normal range, and the actuator was effectively shrugging and saying not yet, not yet, never moving the fins enough to spin the turbo up properly. The turbo was barely engaging at all.

    And there it was. The missing power, explained. Morrison hadn’t been ill so much as half-asleep.

    The fix, mercifully, was simple in principle: the actuator rod has a threaded adjuster, and by threading it in I could bring the start of its travel back to the correct pressure. I set it so movement began low, back around that 150 mmHg mark, with full travel arriving in the low 400s, right in line with the document. One small, oddly satisfying detail: there was a blob of weld sitting right at the point I eventually adjusted it to. Someone, at some time, had deliberately set this actuator and fixed it in place. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about that for now; it’s a thread I’ll come back to.

    Buttoning it back up

    With the actuator set correctly, it was time to reassemble, and that meant new gaskets.

    A gasket is simply a thin layer of material that sits in the joint between two metal parts and seals it. Metal surfaces are never perfectly flat, and the gaps between them, however tiny, are more than enough for hot exhaust gas or oil under pressure to escape through. The gasket is squeezed between the two faces and deforms to fill every imperfection, making the joint properly gas- and oil-tight. They’re not reusable, either: once a gasket has been crushed into shape and cooked by exhaust heat, it’s done its job and won’t seal a second time. So every joint I’d opened got a fresh one.

    New gaskets in, the turbo went back on: the mount, the exhaust reconnected (and those loose bolts properly torqued this time) the oil drain and feed, the charged-air pipe, the air feed, and finally all the bits and pieces I’d had to strip away to reach the wretched thing in the first place and then check all the fixings are tightened to the correct torque. And away we go.

    So, problem solved, full power restored, lesson learned?

    Well. That was certainly what I thought as I stood back and admired the job. It was also, as it turned out, only the very beginning. Because the actuator was just the first of the things I was about to discover wrong with Morrison’s turbo circuit.

    And it was time to fire it up …

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  • 7 June 2026, Bad Bocklet to home

    The last morning at Kunzmann’s. We had done most of the packing the night before, so there was nothing to do but go down to breakfast at eight and eat slowly, which is a luxury I do not often allow myself on the final day of anything. The dining room had the settled quiet of a place where most of the guests have already left or are about to. Dry light at the windows; the promise of a clear run.

    The useful thing happened over the rolls and coffee, which is generally where useful things happen. A man at a nearby table turned out to be staying at the hotel and working a stall at the show, one of the stalls Ochi and I had walked past without stopping. He was with Separ, who make filters for diesel, the marine and industrial and automotive sort that strip particles and water out of fuel before it reaches the engine. Water in the tank is the kind of small, stupid hazard that can finish an engine in a place where there is no help for a thousand miles, and so the conversation took hold at once. His stall had been linked to Bimobil, whom we had deliberately not sought out, since Bimobil build whole vehicles and we are building our own. Filters, though, are exactly our concern. We swapped details. He offered to talk it through properly once we were home, and I mean to take him up on it.

    What he said dovetailed with a plan for the Sprinter that I have been turning over for months. The idea, borrowed straight from boats, is two tanks: a large one for storage and a small day tank that the engine alone draws from. Each morning you pump from storage to the day tank, passing the fuel through the filter on the way, so that whatever the engine sees has already been cleaned of water and grit. It is the sort of arrangement that costs a little in plumbing and complication and pays for itself the first time you fill up at some remote pump with fuel of doubtful provenance. To have a name and a firm and a willing contact arrive by accident on the last morning, after three days of looking for exactly this kind of thing on purpose, was a quiet pleasure.

    We left at half past nine. Five hundred and fifty miles ahead, the SL with its soft top up as it had been the whole trip, the 1997 car carrying us home as steadily as it had carried us out. I had loaded a long playlist days ago, rock and jazz and classical with a little funk threaded through it, and we simply let it run, as we had let it run across the whole journey.

    Three stops, to mirror the outbound leg, which had also taken three. The first was fuel: Shell V-Power Racing, the 100RON grade, at 2.80 euros a litre. Dearer even than the fill on the way out, which had been close to 2.50 at a middle stop. I have only ever found that grade in Germany, and so I bought it as a kind of send-off for the old car, a last treat before the duller petrol of home, the price be damned. The second stop was for legs and food, the rolls we had made up at breakfast and wrapped in a napkin, eaten standing by the car. The third, more fuel, at the Belgian and French border.

    It was at that second stop that the roof finally came down. The sky had settled into a clean, washed blue and the air had turned properly warm at last, and there seemed no longer any reason to keep the world shut out. Down it went, for the first time all week, and it stayed down the rest of the way into Calais. I had half expected it to be worth having only on the country roads, but it was the opposite: with the top folded away even the plain motorway miles changed character entirely, the noise and the rush of air no longer something to be sealed against but the whole point of the thing, the drive turned from a distance to be covered into something to be in. Nine hundred miles of this trip with the roof up, and the best of the driving came in the last few hours with it down.

    The traffic flowed the whole way, which on a return leg through Germany, Belgium and France is not to be assumed. We reached the LeShuttle terminal at Calais at quarter to six, a full hour and a half ahead of check in closure for the train we had booked, and were waved onto an earlier train. Home by half past eight, local time.

    Twelve hours, door to door. The same as the journey out, to the hour. There is a tidiness to that which I noticed with more satisfaction than the fact really warrants. Between songs, and again on the last stretch of motorway, Ochi and I came back more than once to the same observation: that it had been a genuinely restful trip and a productive one, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. The Separ conversation is the loose end I want to pull on first. Filters, two tanks, a morning routine of pumping clean fuel forward. A year from now it may be the thing that keeps us moving.

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  • 6 June 2026, Bad Kissingen

    The showers came and went all morning, never quite settling into rain proper but never clearing either, and by the time we had finished breakfast it was plain the walk up to Botenlauben was off. We had planned the climb through the woods to the castle, but the sky had other ideas, and I felt no particular loss in it. We have made that walk before, on drier days, and there is a comfort in knowing a place well enough to let the weather decide. So the day became a slow one by agreement, which suited us both.

    We drove into Bad Kissingen and took lunch at one of the town’s bistros. I will not name it, partly because there are several and partly because the one worth recommending one year may have changed hands the next, so the name would only mislead anyone reading this later. The food was unfussy and good, and we sat over it a long while. The talk turned, as it has each evening this week, to the van. We are at the stage of reckoning with how much work is still ahead, which jobs we cannot do ourselves and will need to bring specialists in for, and how to keep the budget from running away, as it so easily does. I will set all that down properly another time, when the decisions are made rather than half-made. For now it is enough to record that the conversation widened rather than narrowed.

    For those who follow, and we have now spent parts of three years coming back to this town, I want to put down what is worth seeing here while it is fresh enough to be useful.

    Bad Kissingen lies in a valley on the Fränkische Saale, the Franconian Saale, which runs roughly north to south through the middle of it. That single fact shapes nearly everything. Because the town sits low, almost any walk out from the centre means climbing, and some of it climbs steeply. Around the spa quarter, though, the ground is gentle and given over to gardens and parkland, the Kurpark, the Altenberg, the Luitpoldpark and the Rose Garden, a dense green fabric laid out along both banks. The parkland spans the river, and throughout it deck chairs are set out for anyone to use, so that you can take your own patch of shade or sun and simply sit. I have always liked that. It asks nothing of you.

    There is a scented path through the parkland, perhaps two hundred metres of it, that I think of separately from everything else. The roses there are not the formal kind in disciplined beds; they grow looser, wilder, and the scent of them gathers in the still air under the trees until it is almost a weight on you. On a warm afternoon you walk into it before you see it. The perfume reaches you first, heavy and sweet and faintly green at the edges, and for those two hundred metres the ordinary business of the day falls quiet. I have walked it more than once for no reason other than that.

    The formal rose garden, the Rosarium, is a different thing and not to be confused with the path above. It holds something near ten thousand bushes, a hundred and thirty varieties, the colours running from pale yellow through pink to a deep red. It was opened in 1913 and laid out for the townspeople, as against the older spa garden that was once kept for paying guests. Worth a look, but it is the wild path that stays with me.

    The graduation tower, the Gradierwerk, stands in the Luitpold Park and costs nothing to visit. A walkway along the Saale leads up to it. The town owes the structure to its old salt trade, and even now brine trickles down over walls of packed blackthorn brushwood on a great timber frame, throwing off a fine salt mist that is said to do the lungs good, something like the air off the North Sea. The thing that strikes you standing before it is that the whole of it is wood, a tall framework stuffed with thorn, far bigger than you expect. On an earlier visit we sat on the west side with the afternoon sun warm on our backs and the water cooling the air in front of us, breathing that clean salted air, and I came away genuinely persuaded that regular use of it would ease the breathing. I have two photographs I mean to keep with this: one of the whole timber structure in the sun (above), and one from the walkway inside (below), the brine-darkened thorn close at hand and the water running in its channel below. It is the inside shot that carries it.

    The KissSalis Therme took us the better part of a half day. It is a large modern wellness complex, ten pools of various sizes inside and out across some eight thousand square metres, with nine saunas and steam baths besides. The big indoor and outdoor pools are made for families. There are treatment rooms you simply walk into, no booking, where you sit among strangers. Of the several kinds I remember only one clearly, so I will speak only of that: a saline mist room, an indoor and more concentrated cousin of the graduation tower. It was cool and thick with mist, the walls and floor finished in small mosaic tiles, with seats built into the walls, room for about a dozen at most. We stayed a quarter of an hour. On leaving you spray down the spot where you sat for whoever comes next, which is a civilised arrangement. The saunas sit within the textile-free section. Massages are easy to come by, and Ochi and I had a couples one, a head-to-toe thing lying side by side, which was as restful as anything we did all trip. One warning to pass on plainly: do not eat there, or if you must, go in with low hopes. We took dinner at the Therme and it was poor, a cheap set menu and dear for what it was.

    Botenlauben Castle is the ruin we had meant to walk to today. It was the home of Otto von Botenlauben, a minnesinger and crusader, and his wife Beatrix de Courtenay. Otto was a songwriter of some standing, one of those gathered into the Codex Manesse, which I find a strange and pleasing thing to stand near. He sold the castle to the bishopric of Würzburg in 1234, and after that it passed through hands, fell into ruin, and was eventually quarried for its stone, so little is left. Two towers still stand, and you can climb both for a fine view over the town. There is a car park just beneath it for anyone who cannot manage the climb; on foot from the centre it is thirty to forty minutes, and a steep thirty to forty at that. Worth the effort even as a ruin.

    The woodland walks wrap around that side of the town. They are beautiful and quiet and kept scrupulously clean. The tracks are compacted earth, the fire-road sort, with steps cut in where the slope steepens. What I remember is the smell: the resin of the spruce, and under it the damp leaf-litter, sweetish with a cool earthy note beneath, the kind the rain brings up. Birdsong the whole way round. It is as complete a disconnection from city and suburb as I know.

    As for the town itself, it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2021, one of the Great Spa Towns of Europe alongside Bath, Vichy and Baden-Baden among others. Some twenty-two or twenty-three thousand people live here, in Lower Franconia, south-east of the Rhön, a little over two hundred metres up. It is more than twelve hundred years old, first written down around the year 801, with its long history first of salt and later of the mineral-water cures that drew kings and famous names. The Kurgarten dates to 1738 and is reckoned the oldest spa garden of its kind. What I keep coming back to, with the eye of a man presently doing up his own house and garden to sell, is how clean it all is, the houses and gardens kept with a care that shows. It quietly shames the effort I have been putting in at home.

    We drove back and stopped at the local Netto for the journey, and that gave the real surprise of the day. A basket of the ordinary things we would buy at home came to just over forty-four euros. The same shop at our Sainsbury’s would be near sixty pounds, half as dear again, and the German quality every bit as good or better. Large jars of pickled gherkins were one ninety-nine, with all manner of other pickled things going cheaply too. It is the sort of thing that lodges in the mind once you are thinking, as we increasingly are, about how to provision the travelling years ahead.

    A quiet day, then, taken slow on purpose, and none the worse for the rain.

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  • 5 June 2026, Kunzmann’s Hotel, Bad Bocklet

    A day with nothing in it that had to be done, which after the long drive and the longer day on the show ground was the whole point of it. Dry and warm, the sky changing its mind every half hour between flat grey and a clean, washed blue. We did not stir early.

    In the late morning we walked out into the parkland, the same ground we had looked down on from the room on the first evening, when no photograph would hold the green. From inside it the green held itself perfectly well. We took about three quarters of an hour over it, an amble rather than a walk, along the gravel paths that thread between the tall spruce and out across the broad lawn, the wooded hills beyond the meadow closing the view in. We did not get as far as the spa quarter, nor did I much want to; the parkland was enough. Bad Bocklet is a spa town, which is what the ‘Bad’ in the name announces before you arrive, a small Bavarian market place of a few thousand people that has held the right to call itself a Markt since long before any of this was here. None of that pressed on the walk. It was simply a quiet town being quiet around us.

    The one piece of practical business was the car. On the way out two days ago, at the first stop, I had noticed the headlight and indicator lens on the SL280 sitting loose in its housing, not falling out but no longer properly held, and I did not want it working itself free somewhere on the autobahn on the way home. So a short trip to a supermarket on the edge of town, a Netto, in search of tape. They had parcel tape and nothing else of any use to me. No duct tape, which is the thing one actually wants for a job like this. I bought the parcel tape and made do.

    Back at the hotel I taped the lens, a stopgap and no more, enough to hold it steady for the run home. It is the sort of repair that looks worse than it is and works better than it looks. I will get the lens off properly once we are home, see whether a clip has gone or the lug has simply tired with age, and either fix it or replace it. The whole small episode left a clear note for the future: there should be a roll of duct tape in the van’s kit before we set off for the travelling years, not bought in a panic at a Netto in a strange town. An old vehicle wants steady small attention, and the things to put it right with ought to be aboard before they are wanted. The SL now, the Sprinter later, the principle is the same.

    Dinner again at a quarter to seven, half board, and this time I wrote the wines down, having let the previous evening’s recommendations slip away unrecorded, which had nagged at me. Both were poured by the glass, the small two-tenths measure. The first was a Jubiläums-Cuvée, a dry white from Weingut Max Müller I at Volkach, classed as a Gutswein, the card promising yellow stone fruit and green apple, juicy, with a lively run of acidity, and delivering more or less what it promised, at seven euros fifty. The second was a Dürkheimer Feuerberg, a Blauer Portugieser, off-dry, from Weinkellerei Langenbach at Trier, ripe-fruited and full with a soft touch of residual sweetness, at seven euros even. No vintage shown on either, which I noticed and let pass.

    The detail that rewarded a second look came afterwards, turning the two names over. The white is a Franconian wine, Volkach lying in Franken, which is as near to a local bottle as the week affords; the red, sold to us in the same breath as a local recommendation, comes by way of a Pfalz house at Trier, which is to say from somewhere else entirely. A ‘local’ wine that turns out to be half from another region is the kind of small slippage I would once have let go by. It grounds the glass in a place to know the difference, rather than leaving it as just a good white and a pleasant red.

    Talk over dinner went back, as it has every evening, to the show: the forty-eight-volt storage, the recirculating shower, the diesel heater, the rest of the list. Nothing settled, nothing decided. We were only turning it over, the way one worries a stone in a pocket without meaning to throw it.

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  • 4 June 2026, The Abenteuer & Allrad show, Bad Kissingen

    Breakfast from eight, and a wide spread to choose from. The bacon was the surprise: cooked properly, crisp without a film of grease on the plate, which is rare when a kitchen is feeding a full dining room at once. I took the cooked breakfast, a couple of pastries afterwards and coffee. Ochi had the cooked breakfast with fresh fruit, and was offered hot almond milk for her coffee, a small courtesy that pleased her.

    Ten minutes by road to Bad Kissingen. We arrived early enough to take a place on the hard standing, of which there are only about a hundred. After that, cars are sent onto the grass, and the recent showers had left it too soft for the old vehicle, so the early start earned its keep. The show occupies a nature reserve, and movement on and off the ground is tightly controlled for that reason. By my reckoning the event has grown a great deal in both exhibitors and visitors across the twenty-odd years it has run.

    The queue for the event coaches was already fairly long when we joined it, but far better managed than in the previous two years, when it had been a scramble with no order to it. This time there was a proper queue. The first coach came after about a quarter of an hour and we boarded the fifth, a ten-minute ride to the gates. They opened at ten; we were through at a little after a quarter past. Most people begin at the gates and work inward, so that end was crowded, and we went straight across to the far side and worked back towards the exit. We spent some five hours on the ground.

    The first stand of any interest belonged to a firm (camping-pioneers) specialising in roof-top tents and in-vehicle table mountings, neither of which we want. What caught my eye instead were their own folding camping chairs, light and strong and genuinely comfortable, and a set of bamboo folding stools and a table of the Qeedo make. I flagged both for later thought rather than purchase.

    Then to the first of the day’s real targets (Clesana), a maker of toilets that seal waste into a high-barrier bag for disposal, with no water and no chemicals involved. The company comes out of medical hygiene and moved into travel only a couple of years ago, first with a built-in model and then, this January, with a portable version. We had seen the portable one briefly at the Caravan Salon in Düsseldorf last year and wanted longer with it. It suits us almost exactly: small, light, battery-powered, easily moved. They were not selling on the day. The distributor sits in Scotland, and we were told that a trader near the gates was stocking them.

    Directly opposite stood a water-treatment specialist (Purion), and water treatment was one of the chief reasons for the trip. They offer flexible, hard-wearing components for keeping stored water clean and disinfected without chemicals: filter housings that take standard cartridge sizes obtainable anywhere in the world, together with a UV-C lamp and driver to cycle the tank. A strong candidate for the build, and one I left thinking well of.

    The find of the day was not on my list at all. A maker of recirculating showers (Dauer Shower), which solves a problem I have turned over for a couple of years. In a small van lived in full time, every litre of water must be carried, and a litre weighs a kilogram and fills a ten-centimetre cube. That is real weight and real volume, both competing with everything else aboard, and a shower is among the worst offenders for getting through water. The obstacle to recycling shower water has always been soap, which is awkward to separate, so existing systems tend to be either large, heavy and power-hungry or else they eat filters, neither acceptable in a van this size. Their answer is a hybrid. You shower in circulation mode for as long as you like, the water kept hot and clean through an easy-clean, long-life filter and using only a couple of litres; then you switch off, soap up, and run a short burst in fresh-water mode straight to the grey tank, so there is no soap to extract from the recirculated water at all. The maker quotes around five litres and 0.15 kWh per shower; my own guess is six to ten, set against the much heavier draw of an ordinary shower. I will write to them once we are home.

    Energy storage next. The living side of the vehicle has long been held back by voltage: the usual twelve volts demands thick, heavy cable for anything that draws hard, which is to say cooling, heating and cooking. I have wanted to move to forty-eight volts for some time, but the kit has been scarce and dear. An Australian (Egon) firm announced a forty-eight-volt architecture in prototype last year and brought the first version to general sale this month, so forty-eight-volt batteries are now the thing required. This stand (Liontron) had a fifty-amp-hour forty-eight-volt unit on show, about 2.5 kWh; four in parallel would give ample capacity at roughly a hundred kilograms. Worth taking further.

    A heating make (Scheer) new to me, though my heating plan is more or less settled, showed a diesel hydronic heater that holds a blue flame even from cold start through careful control of the air-to-diesel mix, which gives a clean, soot-free burn (typically these types of devices run a yellow, inefficient flame until at full burn temperature). I need heat for the living quarters, both underfloor and blown, for hot water, and for pre-heating the engine in very cold places. This unit is larger and heavier than I had imagined, and it draws on both AC and DC, which adds complexity, but it interested me, and the person on the stand had genuine technical depth.

    The mattress question took up a good while at the stand of an Austrian maker (Flexima) of made-to-measure beds for vehicles, handmade. I want a bed left permanently made up rather than rebuilt from the seating each night. A roof-drop bed would cost too much height in a van already tall, with its raised suspension and large off-road wheels, so the plan is a bed that folds in two and stands upright at the rear when not in use. The mattress therefore has to be relatively thin, light and foldable down the middle, yet still comfortable after years of use. I tried two of theirs and found both very comfortable. The foam carries internal plastic spring elements that can be adjusted to firm or soften different zones, which I had not seen before. I spoke with Chris Schoneman, their Benelux director, and came away expecting this to be our choice. I mean to post a CAD drawing of the internal layout in a later entry.

    A British company trading (GN Espace) from Widford in Hertfordshire, with a long history of supplying the marine trade, showed induction hobs and multifunction sinks that looked very well made. Worth another conversation.

    We returned to a maker of hanging chairs of the hammock kind (Mira Art), which appealed to Ochi last year. We tried them again and liked them again. I have a suspension solution in mind already, so the difficulty is the weight and stowage of the parts rather than the chairs themselves. A luxury, to be settled last if there is capacity to spare.

    I spent time with Michael Iglhaut, whose firm (Iglhaut) converted our vehicle into the capable off-roader it is back in 2000. That connection matters for the future: access to their knowledge of the vehicle and to their own parts as things wear or break, so I am glad to be building the acquaintance.

    By the exit stood the trader we had been told about, and he had the Clesana X1 portable toilet in stock. We bought it there and then, so the van now has its toilet, the one firm purchase of the day.

    So the day’s reckoning: the toilet bought; the Austrian mattress now the likely answer for the folding rear bed. Carried forward as candidates or jobs to do are the water-treatment components, the forty-eight-volt storage to match the new architecture, the diesel heater for further investigation, the recirculating shower to be contacted from home, the British induction hob and sink for another conversation, the folding chairs and bamboo stools flagged, and the hanging chairs left to last on grounds of weight and stowage. I took no photographs as I was too focused on the exhibitors.

    Coach back to the car, the short drive to Kunzmann’s, and a look round the hotel’s spa before dinner at a quarter to seven. The local wines the hotel recommended were very good, but I failed to note their names, which I regret; I shall record tomorrow evening’s recommendations so they at least appear in the next day’s pages.

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  • 3 June 2026, Kunzmann’s Hotel, Bad Bocklet, Germany

    Up and out by quarter to five, the house still dark, the road emptier than I have seen it in months. There is a particular quiet to that hour, neither night nor properly morning, when the only other vehicles are lorries, early commuters and the odd dog-walker’s car. We took the Mercedes SL280, a 1997 model, with the soft top up and kept up the whole way.

    The hard top is at home; the soft top means that when the summer weather does arrive we can have it down and enjoy the driving properly, which is some consolation for the noise it lets in. The weather today could not make up its mind, so the decision to keep it closed made itself.

    Breakfast at the Folkestone LeShuttle terminal, at Leon’s, before the crossing. I had an egg and bacon bap and a coffee; Ochi had a coffee with soya milk and not much else. We sat among the usual early travellers and watched the boards for our shuttle. There were others plainly bound for the same sort of long weekend as us: a knot of sports cars gathered together, the drivers comparing routes in the way men do over coffee at six in the morning, off on some group run south; and a band of Harley riders in their leathers. Now and again one of them would fire up an engine out on the apron, and the sound carried right into the terminal, the deep throaty roar of a V8 answered by the slower, looser beat of the V-twins. A good noise to set off on.

    The crossing itself was the one small surprise of the day. We had braced ourselves for the new EES biometric registration at the border, fingerprints and photographs and the queues everyone has been warning about, and instead the checks were simply closed. We went straight through to French passport control and out the other side without breaking stride. I assume this was a temporary suspension to keep the traffic moving rather than a system not yet switched on, for I gather it has been fully live since the tenth of April.

    After that the day became the drive, and the drive was a good one. France, then Belgium, then into Germany, the roads relatively empty and the progress constant. Three stops on the European side, more or less evenly spaced: a short leg-stretch at the first, food and fuel in the middle, another short stretch near the end. The car drove very well for its age. A little noisy, as the soft top, insulated though it is, does not seal out the world the way the hard top does, so there was always a layer of wind and road under everything. The steering is vague and uncommunicative, but that is how these were built, and after the first hour the hands stop expecting anything else. Around thirty miles to the gallon throughout, which I was pleased with.

    I treated it at the middle stop. The pumps offered 100 RON unleaded, ethanol-free, a step up from the 95 we run at home, and I bought it on the car’s behalf rather than my own, at something close to two euros fifty a litre. Shell, I think, though I did not check closely. An indulgence, plainly, but the engine is older than a good many of the drivers on that autobahn and has earned the better stuff.

    We played music most of the way, a long eclectic mixture of rock and jazz and classical with a little funk thrown in, the sort of programme that only assembles itself properly on a long drive. We finished, somewhere in the last stretch, with Pink Floyd’s ‘Delicate Sound of Thunder’, the live album, for by then we had turned off the autobahn for the final hour and were running through forest and open country instead. It was unexpectedly lovely: the road folding in under dark stands of trees, then opening out across fields of a green so deep and wet-looking it seemed almost lit from within, the hills rising soft and wooded ahead. After a day of motorway it was like changing register entirely. The talk, between songs, kept circling back to tomorrow and the show, what we wanted to see, which exhibitors to take first, what we might actually buy as opposed to merely covet.

    We reached Kunzmann’s at half past five, local time, near enough twelve hours after leaving home once the hour’s difference is accounted for. Reception was courteous and unfussy and we were shown up to the room without delay. It is clean and more than large enough, of a quality I had hoped for, and the view is the thing:

    south over the parkland, tall spruce, a broad lawn with a giant chess set laid out on it, swing seats and chairs scattered about, a timber cabin, gravel paths threading between, and beyond the meadow the wooded hills. No photograph ever quite holds that depth of green, though I attach one here and let it try.

    Dinner at quarter to seven, half board. It was good, properly cooked and properly served, without a single dish that demanded to be remembered. That is no complaint. It was the reason we changed our minds about where to stay this year: last summer we had an à la carte dinner here that was very good indeed for both the quality and the price, enough to draw us away from the guest houses we used the previous two years. This is our third year running at the show and our first night under this roof, and the decision feels sound so far.

    To bed early, or what passes for early after a day that began before five. Tomorrow the Abenteuer & Allrad at Bad Kissingen, four days of it though we only need the one, more than four hundred exhibitors across off-road, caravanning and overlanding, expedition vehicles and motorhomes and all the equipment that goes with them. That is properly a matter for tomorrow’s entry.

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  • I’m back, and the diary starts again

    I’ve been off-message, off-brand, off me box this past long while, head down in the slog of it, and not a word posted to show for it. That ends here.

    A short word on where the time went, and then the good part. The house and garden have eaten more of these last six months than I care to admit, scrubbed, mended and made presentable for sale, because the travelling years do not begin until someone else holds the keys to this place. It is dull work and I will not dwell on it. It is nearly done.

    What I will dwell on is the van. Morrison is, as I write, stripped back to the bare shell, every system out, the metalwork laid open and honest before me, mid-way through a restoration thorough enough to earn the next quarter-century. There is a great deal to tell, the turbo, the steering, the great interior strip-down and all that has followed, and I mean to tell it properly in catch-up entries as the time comes. It has not been silence for want of doing. Quite the opposite.

    But a van under restoration is a van going nowhere, and a blog needs the open road as much as the workshop. So before the catch-ups begin, something different.

    The next four entries that follow this one are not about Morrison at all. They are from a long weekend Ochi and I took at the start of June, driving the old SL280 across to Germany for the Abenteuer & Allrad show at Bad Kissingen, four days of it set down as they happened: the drive out, the show ground and everything on it we coveted or carried home, and two slower days in a Bavarian spa town that has quietly become a place we return to. The show is where a good deal of the habitation plan took shape, the toilet, the mattress, the forty-eight-volt question, the recirculating shower, so it feeds directly back into the build even if there is not a spanner in sight.

    I will post them separately over the coming days. Read them as a breather between the heavy lifting, and as a reminder of what all the heavy lifting is actually for.

    The tools are still out. The work goes on. Watch this space, properly this time.

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  • The Maiden Voyage

    The transaction with Rory is complete, the keys have been handed over, and the vehicle is officially ours. Naturally, the euphoria of procurement was immediately tempered by the reality of the task at hand: the one hundred and thirty-mile transit to bring Morrison home.

    We were acutely aware during the initial test drive that the turbocharger was singing its swan song. It wasn’t yet making any truly catastrophic noises, so we took a calculated risk to limp it home. The journey was, to put it mildly, sedate. The single carriageway sections of the A303 provided their usual bottleneck, and given our reluctance to push the engine, I fear we may have been the architects of some significant tailbacks. If you were stuck behind a rather tentative-looking campervan recently, do accept my humblest apologies.

    It was during this long, slow procession that I had ample time to acquaint myself with the vehicle’s idiosyncrasies. I noted a distinct vagueness in the steering; play that felt beyond the usual character of such a machine. Then, to add a dash of adrenaline to the final leg, as we navigated the exit slip off the M25, the side door decided to liberate itself from the latch mechanism, sliding open entirely of its own accord. A spirited end to the journey, indeed.

    Safely back at headquarters, I have been able to conduct a proper post-mortem.

    Upon turning the key now, the turbo has developed a decided rattle. To prevent the impeller shattering and feeding metal shards into the engine, replacing this unit has become the highest priority. The vehicle shall remain grounded until this is rectified. The turbo was replaced only 8,000 miles ago, which, I think points the finger squarely at oil starvation. Consequently, I shall be examining the oil feed and return lines to ensure we do not find ourselves in this position again.

    The steering diagnosis proved slightly less grim. While oversized tyres invariably place undue stress on steering components, the issue does not appear to be the universal joint on the lower column (which was replaced relatively recently). Rather, the play seems to stem from a missing grommet where the column passes through the bulkhead. A simple fix, one hopes.

    Finally, the self-opening door. The diagnosis is straightforward, worn runners, but the remedy is less so. Accessing the mechanism requires the removal of the entire kitchen unit. While this turns a small job into a significant project, it is a blessing in disguise; stripping the interior will allow me to properly assess the condition of the internal metalwork.

    These three items: the turbo, the steering, and the great interior strip-down will form the basis of our next few entries. The real work begins now.

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  • The Torch is Passed it’s a New Era for Morrison

    Description

    Taking the keys to a legend is a heavy responsibility. When a vehicle has crossed the Sahara, navigated the Skeleton Coast, and clocked over 25 years of history, it stops being just a collection of metal and rubber. It becomes an archive of memories.
    We are Jason and Ochi, and we are the new custodians of Morrison.

    Description

    First and foremost, we want to send a massive thank you to Rory and Lucy. For a quarter of a century, they didn’t just drive this custom Iglhaut beast; they gave it a life. They proved that this van was built for the extraordinary, pushing it through revolutions, deserts, and 18 countries on a single run. We wish them nothing but fair winds and open roads in their future adventures. They have set a high bar for stewardship, and we intend to honour that legacy.

    But every great adventurer needs a moment to catch their breath, and Morrison has been resting for a little while.

    While the bones of this machine, the permanent 4-wheel drive, the diff locks, and that indomitable off-road suspension, are as solid as ever, the world of overlanding has evolved, and so too must the van. Our immediate goal isn’t just to drive it, but to recondition and retrofit it.

    The next few months on this blog won’t be about travel destinations, but about transformation. We are stripping things back to ensure Morrison is robust, reliable, and ready for the modern era. We plan to modernise the systems and inject a new level of comfort into the living quarters, ensuring that when the wheels finally turn in anger again, this van is ready for any corner of the globe we point it toward.

    We might be the ones holding the steering wheel and turning the wrenches, but this story belongs to the van. We are just here to make sure it’s ready for the next 100,000 miles.

    The tools are out. The work begins now.

    Watch this space.

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  • The next chapter of the Vanplan will start in a few days!

    The van has been sold and after a bit of TLC and some reconfiguration to cary a couple of bikes she will be off again.. watch this space to follow the next adventure.