Agatha Alice the van has new owners

Today we finally sold our distinctive van after it has sat mostly unused in our driveway. If it wasn't a fault with the van it was a problem with the driver's health, either way it got very little actual use and cost a lot to maintain. I have given the new owners the URL for this forum, maybe they will join, maybe they will keep the name on the van, who knows.
I'll take advice from members here as to whether to cancel my account now that there are no Hi-Aces in the family.

Do you rip off the band-aid; do you slowly wean yourself slowly off the memories; or do you keep coming back and re-opening the wounds of loss?

Sad to see you go, I loved the deep orange of your van, great colour!!

Thanks @GPW.
I'm swinging by occasionally still, but nowhere near as often as before. While the van had great eye-appeal for some its unreliability made Carole become afraid of it which may have contributed psychologically to her getting crook whenever she thought of going away in it.

As it happens, the new owner was told specifically to keep a watch on the modified temperature gauge and make sure to pull over and stop if it got up too high due to the tendency to crack heads etc. We thought he understood what he was told but he had taken the morning off work to come down and buy the van, he spent longer than planned at our place and so was running late to get back to work. Where he lives there is a very steep long hill that has to be climbed on the way; instead of doing as he was told he gunned it up that hill and ignored the temp gauge. Result: he made the rest of the journey on a flat-deck tow truck and has since fitted a new engine. No doubt he was even later for work than he would have been if he'd taken it easy up that hill! Fortunately he admitted it was his own fault and is still happy with his purchase. That poor engine lasted all the way from the factory in 1990 until that day with no issues, it never emitted any smoke whatsoever while we had it.

Oops!
Yes the cooling in the vans is only marginal and it's difficult keeping track of a gauge in a new vehicle, add the heavy body and a big hill and it will struggle to keep cool. Add in the damped temperature gauge and that's it.
A friend of mine sold a car for spares or repair and also told the buyer to watch the temperature, instead the guy ragged it home and wrecked it - common theme!

The cooling of the 1kz isn't great even on the 4x4's it was in because the side mounted thermostat was part of a disastrous trend by makers to try to be clever and use the thermostat on the inlet side - thermally balanced by diverted head flow kicking it open. This causes a fight between the incoming cold water and the head water bypassing from one side of the head which can cause thermal oscillations so to 'fix' this they damped the gauge with a 3V zener killing 25-50% of the range. Porsche did it to - it wrecked countless 996 and 997 engines, they literally cooked at traffic lights and when the light went green the bores were as soft as cheese and got scored and sometimes broke off (open deck head) entirely. The Toyota engines were stronger but the heads cracked instead.

There's a reasonable mod for these inlet thermostat engines using the Landrover pressure sensitive high bypass thermostat that I did to mine and together with re-enabling the temperature gauge really does work. However the max cooling effect up a steep hill wouldn't be that much different - perhaps a little more flow but the radiators are the same size!

Yes but I had modified the temp gauge to remove the damping and told the guy about it! Some people just can't be told.
No longer my problem.

Yes I realised you did that, the excitement of being in a new van is usually too much for people to think about the details of looking at a gauge

Carole has now bought a Toyota Dyna which is a close cousin, but this is a far better vehicle than the Hiace was as far as facilities go, we're just working through some small issues with it at the moment.
if anyone is interested I can post up some pictures later on, but I'll understand if there's no interest as it isn't a Hiace despite being described as one on its registration.

I'd be interested in how your new van compares.

Yay!!

Dyna's pretty much the same, would be good to see!

It's in the panel shop at the moment having the rust attended to. Will get some photos probably in a week or two when more of the jobs that need doing have been done. So far for every job I tick off the list I seem to add two ......
It is a really nice setup and considering it is actually slightly shorter than the orange monster was, it is far more roomy due to being slightly wider and somewhat taller.