What’s keeping Diamond Dave busy this month?
A shock to the system
We recently saw a very unusual fault on a ’van – a snapped shock absorber on an Al-Ko chassis. When I say snapped, I really do mean snapped: the piston rod had bent until it snapped in two. On removing it, I discovered there was a small dent in the main body case, close to the top.
I’m guessing this jammed the piston inside, then when the suspension compressed again, because the piston couldn’t move, the rod bent until it could simply bend no more.
The customer did say they had driven across some very rough terrain, and they believed a rock or something hard and heavy had been thrown up and hit the shock absorber body.
Seasonal troubles
Other than that, and general servicing and fitting of air suspension, solar and other ancillary kit, we’ve had the usual early-season glut of dead leisure batteries, failing or leaking water pumps and fridges that don’t cool on gas.
Leisure battery issues are almost always down to lack of maintenance – by that, I mean people putting their ’van into storage and then forgetting about it for a couple of months.
What they should do, though, is make sure that everything is switched off, including the main distribution unit if possible (Sargent units have a master shutdown, for example), because that can often have a small current draw.
If you don’t have solar, or the ’van is parked in a shaded area, either visit weekly and give it a run-out, or remove the leisure battery/batteries and k
