RALIVAN2: Our 2015 144" Sprinter

3 minute(s) of a 55 minute read

The last time we updated the RALIVAN we had just had it rustproofed. Well, we are happy to report that in the 9 months since we had that done it hasn’t gone rusty, yet. We haven’t driven it much either. Perhaps only a couple of hundred miles. You guys are keeping us so busy buying wheels (thanks) that we can’t get out to events like we used to. We’ve been to one autocross towing this year but do have plans to do the Empire Hill Climb again so there’s that. Before we take it out in public again, we thought we’d put the windshield banner, lost during windshield replacement, back in place.

Before we loaded it up and attached the trailer, we thought we should try to address the over-heating issues we had last time we tried this. The wisdom of the Sprinter forums suggested the viscous fan goes bad but a local Sprinter guru said it’s always the radiator getting clogged that does for them. With not a lot of time and a “while you’re in there attitude” we decided to replace both. The radiator was a bugger to get out, if you didn’t know how it was attached. We didn’t but a couple of YouTube videos had us wised up. It was still a struggle though. Still, once it was out it made the fan easier to get off.

We cut it a bit close to the wire, not helped by having to replace the trailer brakes two days before we were due to leave, so when we set off for Empire, fully loaded and dragging our race car and trailer, we really had no idea if we had improved anything. We needn’t have worried however:

It now drives like a new van!