Worth Keeping my Hiace

Ok, those metal items have writing on the side - pull a clean one and take a photo of the side, it describes what it is. It looks more like a relay to me, but an unusual type.

BTW that rust looks like historical dampness, you may wish to pull a fuse/relay, clean the connectors and coat with ACF50 - work around all fuses - so you can be sure every connection is good still.

Oil gets thinner when hotter. Sounds like your A/T box changes into reverse after a pressure boost (more revs). That indicates fluid to me, and very possibly the AT oil filter that needs replacing.

On this site somewhere is a fuse layout that should shed some light, but your fuse panel looks different to mine - is that the one under the dash near your feet? Anything written on the fusebox cover.

BTW Overpaying is something we all do, but it looks like some TLC and you'll end up with a very nice van. The 'upstairs' sleeping area is IMO only for kids and standing room - and useful storage for bedding of course.

I will pull one at some point, not today though cos after last night I'm nursing a bit of a delicate head right now!  You're right, I believe they are relays too.  I've found the odd picture that has similar ones to mine and they're relays in those pics.

Interesting to hear your opinion on the oil!  I've read somewhere (I'll see if I can find it again) that the oil filter on these AT boxes is kinda pointless to change as it's a simple mesh.  Are they difficult to change do you know?

Unforuntunately this won't really get much TLC till next spring - not too long before I go to Austria where it will spend most of the winter parked up and covered in snow!

Good to know about the upstairs sleeping compartment.  I was gutted because I really wanted to sleep up there on a double foam mattress!  It has a bunk bed setup in there at the moment, but only a thin single and not the best for sleeping on.

Ryank wrote:

Are they difficult to change do you know?

I think you have to take the gearbox sump off to do it, I'm not sure if it's gauze or what. Maybe try the fluid only fix first?


I didn't spot the diagram last time - yes, they look like relays.

Unusual looking van, like the love child of a Dehler, Westfalia and Toyota three way tryst  Looks pretty cool.  Guess it also pretty heavy, which might explain shorter life expectancy of the AT fluid (separate question, what are the axle weights on LWB HiAces?  Japanese imports don't have them or GVW on the VIN).

We've usually slept in the roof of our pop-top Westy.  First night with the HiAce we slept in the roof.  Was hilarious getting in and out and incredibly hot.  We sleep downstairs now...

GPW wrote:

I think you have to take the gearbox sump off to do it, I'm not sure if it's gauze or what. Maybe try the fluid only fix first?

Still waiting for the oil to arrive, but yeah, gonna try that first!

TwentyOneThirtyFive wrote:

Unusual looking van, like the love child of a Dehler, Westfalia and Toyota three way tryst Wink  Looks pretty cool.  Guess it also pretty heavy, which might explain shorter life expectancy of the AT fluid (separate question, what are the axle weights on LWB HiAces?  Japanese imports don't have them or GVW on the VIN).

We've usually slept in the roof of our pop-top Westy.  First night with the HiAce we slept in the roof.  Was hilarious getting in and out and incredibly hot.  We sleep downstairs now...

I'm just a bit gutted as the nice double bed platform would have given me a way to have a comfy nights sleep (the single is just too thin) without taking up all the floorspace in this van.  

I saw this the other day, admittedly no shower or toilet, but I'm highly jealous of that interior.

https://imgur.com/gallery/JoL1v[/quote]

Ryank wrote:

https://imgur.com/gallery/JoL1v

That's an awesome interior - he's a very skilled cabinet maker.
Note however that:

1) There are no side windows - i..e it's a dark stealth approach.
2) The cooker area is lovely, but it also has the best view out of the sliding door.

I love the table and chairs arrangement, that may be doable in a pod fitted in a Hiace. Great space saving idea.

It's a common theme of finding a better/cheaper buy soon after you buy something - in a way it's inevitable because your interest and spidey senses are on the lookout when you have one

I like the stealth approach. Mine would be more stealth if it could be!

Mind you, other than my mechanical problems and the other things I've listed like the lack of double bed, I actually really like my van. I actually bought it cos it's fully kitted out to live in (with the exclusion of a solar power setup) and it's a little more stealth with the smaller windows than don't cover the whole length of the vehicle like most. At the moment I have aluminium bubble wrap on them so there's no view anyway! It would be nice if the interior was a bit less 80's and a bit better designed as although I can stand up in it, there's no floor space at all other than the very thin pathway between the single bed, cooker and fridge on the left, all the stuff on the right hand side, which is the gas heater and a couple of small cupboards isn't well thought out and takes up a fair amount of space for very little funtionality. The space could definitely be better utilised.

But although I'm jealous of that interior, I neither have the time, the patience, the tools or the skills to do anything like that!

After seeing this video, I'm thinking although it's a load of ballache, it may be worth flushing the torque converter too!  



It may actually be that thin oil has been causing my issues.  It would indeed cause the AT oil temp light to come on a lot.  I wonder if thin oil is also causing the problem with reverse gear not engaging - if it's very thin, the torque converter would indeed have a problem getting pressure to change to reverse.  Not sure why it's only reverse, but thinking it probably requires more pressure to change to reverse rather than drive.

Hmmm... although considering this video, and the fact that my oil is definitely burnt (I couldn't see any metal flakes in it though) I wonder if perhaps a flush of the torque converter is a good idea or not!




I have no idea! Perhaps I'll change the oil twice over a couple of weeks, then give it a flush after if the oil still doesn't look good after 2 changes...

Excellent videos - thanks for posting them.

I'd suggest as your fluid is burnt, you need to change all of it.
However I think it's also important to change the filter and get rid of the crud in the pan!

Technically I guess you'd a) change the pan filter, b) flush, c) change the filter again (easier the 2nd time!).

Regardless it seems a filter change is the first thing to do. Make sure you fit genuine Toyota parts BTW, as it's a central and difficult to reach bit.

I won't do it myself. I could manage the oil change but anything outside of that is a little bit out of my reach, especially as I don't even have a way to raise the front at all without balancing it on a jack while I work underneath. The bloody oil I got a bargain on was too good to be true and it never arrived, so just waiting on some more to come in now. I've found a local garage, so I'm gonna call them tomorrow and find out how much it'll cost.

What is most annoying is that when I took it to the Toyota garage with all the engine problems they refused to change the gearbox oil. If they had done it when I originally asked, I'm sure I wouldn't be having these issues again. I have to say of all the trouble I've had with this toyota, and especially how abolutely completely useless, workshy and just downright dishonest their Official dealers are, and not one, but two on completely different ends of the country! I almost certainly will never buy a toyota again.

Mostly you'll find official dealers of any make won't want to work on a vehicle of that age, so they will make excuses (I did get some work done by a VW garage in Ireland once and they were great though, but I did have the part, just not any tools). You are better off finding a commercial vehicle garage.

Thanks for posting the vids. I was going to change my ATF (as I have little history of the vehicle), but that made me decided to do the filter as well, then do a flush next time.

I've been through this same story of unreliability with my VW. A '91 T4 with the 'bullet proof' 5 pot 2.4D. First it dropped a valve, which destroyed the cylinder head and a bunch of other stuff. Once rebuilt it leaked combustion gas into the coolant. 3 head gaskets later the engine was stripped and rebuilt. It still leaked. Less than 2000 miles later it lost oil pressure (right in the middle of the Houtribdijk!).

Had a remanufactured engine fitted. That lasted less than 1000 miles. Supplier blamed the garage that fitted it. Garage blamed supplier...

That was rebuilt, I'm now nearly 600 miles into the running in period and then she's up for sale in 400 miles

I have a Toyota now and am teaching myself to turn spanners

How's that for 'Tale of Woe' Top Trumps?

dan
ps '91 Westfalia for sale if anyone is interested...

Wow - yes, I've heard of some real horror stories with the VWs.
I think with VW you either go back to the simple air-cooled and accept a certain amount of maintenance work on a very fixable van with huge backup, or you steer clear.

I think you need to find a very small family garage TBH, main dealers have other priorities and can be expensive - you need an older, careful family guy to do the filter and flushing IMO.

GPW wrote:

Wow - yes, I've heard of some real horror stories with the VWs.

Conversely I know a guy who has a similar age 2.4D Westy, with something like 350k miles on the clock and it runs as smooth as silk. A lot is determined by how it was looked after, but mine had a good level of service history when I bought it at 160k miles.

Wow Dan, you have had some tales of disasters! I've had my fair share of nightmare bike situations, luckily they can be pushed when all else fails usually! Once when I was 19 I pushed my motorcycle for 8 miles to a garage, only to find the ignition points had rusted to the point that I would get lights, but not enough power to generate a spark - the mechanic pulled apart the engine kill switch and it started right up! I felt like a right plonker!

Biggest problem for me isn't actually the lack of inclination to do the work, but more the fact that I have no tools, am in a foreign country, with on street parking, and if I do attempt things and they go wrong I have very little support, and I can't just find any old garage and explain the issues to them and trust them to fix it, let alone for a reasonable price. I bought the thing for 8 grand, and I initally suspected that it was sold because of the alternator/vacuum pump problem that cost me 2 grand to get sorted and left me stranded for 2 weeks in a ghost town. However now I'm thinking the previous owner had an inkling about the transmission problems and got rid of it cos he saw what crazy costs were coming up, despite the thing having done less than 100,000 miles, at least according to the clocks.

Now I have another potentially killer cost coming up. I no longer work in IT earning good money, but am just a poor ski instructor, and this van has been a complete money sink and I don't think I'll get anywhere near the money I've put into it already, let alone if the gearbox is a gonner, which is a bit of a problem, as it's my life savings, and they're almost all gone!

Ok, well, cars are the worst investments that can be done. Sorry to say that. But I get the idea of living in a van, which is of course much cheaper than to buy/own/rent a house.

And I'm sorry to hear the troubles that you had with the van. Perhaps it had to suffer more with the extra weight and high roof?

Switching to something else will not be without risk too. As said, the VW vans can have enough issues as well, although not all of them do. We know some people that bought a T4 1.9tdi's to do some nice touring, but after a few periods of issues they sold them again...
I even borrowed a relatively new T5 van which had done like 160.000 miles with an automatic, it was sometimes randomly making a lot of engine revs.. Supposed to be normal that the automatic is not at its best anymore with that kind of mileage.. ok, sounds strange to me.

The Hiace can be very reliable. The vans that go for export to Africa usually have something like 200 to 250.000 miles on the clock and they still work.
But those are very simple versions. No automatic, no new diesel engines (like the 1KZ) so no ECU's that can fail. Slow but steady. Unfortunatly they are not all so reliable as you have seen.

About the dealerships, you are expecting to much out of them. What you have there is an older vehicle to them, and the size of it already can be an issue to take it into service.
They can service the basic stuff just fine. But to give you an example: A friend got a nice Landcruiser which was always services by the Toyota dealership, everything perfectly documented. But never in the life of that Landcruiser had the front diff been opened to check the oil level or refill it at the required service interval. But the extra charges for expensive service had always been paid!

My van goes to a local shop, a guy who does a lot of 4x4 stuff but also does work on a lot of general stuff. But yeah, it is hard to find the right car shop when you are unknown in the area.

That's certainly the lesson I've learned Dan - offical dealierships are useless. Also, as a customer it's not really my problem if they have insubstantial facilites for a a brand in made the manufacturer they are dealerships for, even if that car is old. It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't listed as a place to take Toyotas in an emergency, as they're clearly not up to that from my experiences.

However, I've also emailed their head office multiple time and left their brand facebook messages, and they always promise to sort it out and then I never hear anything again. So it seems their inability to answers emails is a companywide policy.

Realistically I should have just bought a cheap escort van or transit and built a wooden bed half way up and used the underside as storage. I had grand plans to live in the van in Germany this summer, but with my brain accident and the problems I've had with the thing, I wasn't able to and I wonder if those were just romantic dreams! The amount of time I've actually slept in it so far, i could have even got away with an estate car I think! Ah well, hindsight eh?

Yeah hindsight...
However, there is a guy called HiaceHobo, he lives in his Hiace all year round.

I dont know what your accident but it sounds bad and in the way of your "van life"
Hope you recovering well.

I've also got a long history of breaking boat engines

From everything I've read up on so far, given that autos are new to me too, is that getting the oil changed is likely to solve your issues.  So...as HiAce4wd is saying, it's just a matter of finding a decent garage.

Where abouts in Spain are you? Anywhere near Gijon (north coast) by any chance?

Sounds like a classic situation - are the pockets deep enough to buy one's way out of trouble or is there a simpler way to fix the vehicle?

It does sound like it wasn't a good buy, but it also seems likely that the auto-box is the last major hurdle and is quite possibly an oil issue.

There is a device called a 'vacuum pump oil drain kit' that I use to change engine oil. The unknowns are:
1) Does the narrow tube fit down the auto check/fill pipe ok
2) If it does, does it reach all the way to the bottom of the sump

Perhaps 1 & 2 could be answered by someone on here with your gearbox? Are there diagrams of the internals online?

If the end of the pipe reaches the bottom of the auto box's sump, this machine would allow you to suck out N litres, which you can then replace with N litres of new oil. Drive it a bit and repeat 2-3 times and you'll find your oil getting newer and newer.

This _may_ be the easiest DIY approach, there's on crawling underneath, you do it all from inside.

Exploded diagram here: http://parts.villagetoyota.com/showAssembly.aspx?ukey_assembly=358483

Hiace4wd wrote:

Yeah hindsight...
However, there is a guy called HiaceHobo, he lives in his Hiace all year round.

I dont know what your accident but it sounds bad and in the way of your "van life"
Hope you recovering well.

Yeah I've heard of HiaceHobo, I've even seen a few of his youtube videos and his blog! If I remember correctly, it's been a while since he updated though.

My accident was a bit of brain trauma I had when I was on an extreme offpiste and avalanche safety advanced ski instructor course. I was super ill, didn't eat for 6 days and then 4 days into the course I think my body was exhausted from the lack of food and I had a bit of a crash. Unfortunately I managed to give myself brain trama, and had to be helicoptered off the mountain and transferred to a hospital, who promptly transferred me to another hospital as I was in bad condition. Well anyway, I spent 9 dys in hostpital, even though at the time I geniunely thought I'd been there for 2 nights, and for the next 2 months I had no sense of taste, no emotions/feelings, not memories, nothing. It was like I was a freshly rebuilt PC. I could still compute and solve logic puzzles apparently, but I had no memories or data, and strangley despite being able to do difficult calculations and logic puzzles, I couldn't get my words in the right order apparently! Obviously most of this has come from the hospital report -I don't actually remember any of it!

Thanks for your kind words though!

GPW wrote:

Sounds like a classic situation - are the pockets deep enough to buy one's way out of trouble or is there a simpler way to fix the vehicle?

I've found a garage more locally who get pretty good reviews and farm out gearbox work to another garage. This gives me a bit of conifdence, as it means this isn't just some cowboy mechanic who will have a crack at anything, but instead farms out the work to someone they know can do it. Also, if they're farming out the work, it must be reasonable work, as otherwise it would affect the reviews of the the first garage who outsources the work. I think I'm gonna get the fluid changed along with the filter, and the magnets cleaned. I think I might ask for the torque converter not to be flushed, so I don't potentially flush out any pieces of suspended clutch debris that's allowing the clutch to get a grip. To be honest, from what I've read, if I change the oil and it goes, it was definitely gonna go sometime, and all you're doing is accelerating the issues. My biggest worry is that I'm gonna need a new one - I don't have the money for that even if they were easy to find! So I'll probably get that done, get my 2000 km drive to the mountains out the way, then change the oil again.

oh and as for the DIY option, I'm kinda running out of time to do it myself to be honest.  I have to wait a week for the new oil order to arrive, and at that point I'll have about 2 to 3 weeks to get it sorted including any problems my luck will inevitably bring me!  

oh and it looks like the hose does go into the sump, as long as the hose is thin enough to get through the join about half way down. But I don't want to be buying and carrying around more stuff if I can help it, so buying a pump and trying it all myself is probably just too much work for the amount of time I'll have to do everything by the time it arrives, alongside the oil.

I've booked it in for a basic service and for the gearbox to have the oil and filter changed, and a cleaning of the magnets, if posisble.  The closest that the garage can fit me in is the day after I get the oil, so I think I'm just gonna try and accept the cost and get it looked at professionally.  Hopefully it will cost me less in the long run...

Good news on finding a garage, hope they manage to solve the issues and you can make your journey to the mountains

Ryank wrote:

I've booked it in for a basic service and for the gearbox to have the oil and filter changed, and a cleaning of the magnets, if posisble.  The closest that the garage can fit me in is the day after I get the oil, so I think I'm just gonna try and accept the cost and get it looked at professionally.  Hopefully it will cost me less in the long run...

The basic service and oil change sounds an excellent idea.
Fingers crossed!!

And good luck with the recuperation.