A Bucket Van for ONLY $1500? What Could Possibly go Wrong??

ah a bucket van just imagine all the fun you can have with one of these picking cherries painting your house or even tree trimming the sellers are asking fifteen hundred dollars for it which is potentially a killer deal if the van is in decent shape about the van it's a 1994 Ford E350 Econoline but at this point that's all I know about it so let's see what we have all right so my stepdad stumbled upon this van here for a pretty good price and I am here to help him take a look at it and see if this thing is in good shape foreign do this with one hand so this apparently is the Windsor 5.8 liter V8 engine take a look at the oil yeah I mean the oil it's a little bit dark but it is full and it looks like oil so that's good you really don't have the best access to work on these van engines coolant yeah it looks like coolant it might have been mixed with another color of coolant but otherwise it looks fine so I guess you have to remove this air filter to do pretty much anything to the engine I can get this out of the way pretty easily though to gain a little bit of excess this looks like a transmission dipstick and I don't think it's supposed to look like that that fan belt that definitely has seen some better days but that's an easy and cheap repair power steering it's pretty close to full that's good brake fluid reservoir looks a little bit low the any fluid in there from the top the brake lines themselves though those look like they're you know in pretty decent shape all right I got the battery turned on let's see if we can start this thing up it comes with not one but three keys yeah this is a little sauce I'm not sure what that's all about all right we got a blower on uh look at that it starts right up yeah we got a little bit of belt and pulling noise in there but otherwise this thing purrs like a kitten which seems pretty good apparently that's only 96 000 miles with that said because it is a bucket truck it has been idled a lot but still that's pretty good that oil pressure is kind of low I don't know if that's the gauge or if we actually have low oil pressure uh the beacons don't work it's a deal breaker okay so the reason why you buy something like this is to use the bucket so let's see if that works okay so I have never operated one of these before let's see it says I'm suggesting myself to death or Serious injury but it sounds exciting to me so I think I need to hold this button down and then raise oh yeah okay it's a little bouncy but it works the engine's at idle so that might be the reason why inner boom see if we can get this to stand yep that works and then rotation yep this thing works fantastic okay I just shut the engine off and I don't think that oil pressure gauge works so considering how the engine sounds I'm not worried about it so the body on this thing it's in pretty darn good shape there's like very little rust tires back here they're only a year old look at that tread fantastic they are a no-name brand but that's fine tires on the front yeah they're all cracked need to be replaced but that's not so bad so we got some fluid leaks differentials leaking the transmission was two and the engine um you know we got surface rust on things like the cross member here and the frame but it's just that it's only surface rust it's actually not too bad the brake lines back here are new as well the transmission's a bit oily all right this thing is a freaking steel I have told my stepdad he should buy it as quickly as possible before the sellers change their minds because work vans go for a ton of money and then when you add a working bucket onto that I mean the value of this thing is way way higher than the fifteen hundred dollars that they're asking for it yeah so I think the plan is to get this towed to my house so that I can work on it for them and then I'll get to use it [Music] thank you [Music] all right so it's the next day I managed to get it off the truck and reversed it to this point but now it won't move in Reverse or drive I'm suspecting low transmission fluid because the transmission is leaking and the dipstick is broken I'm gonna try adding a quart or so and see if that helps thank you [Music] so if I give it enough gas the wheel over here does start spinning so the transmission's working so maybe the wheel on this side is locked up like the brakes or something well I can't even budge this thing so I guess I'm gonna be pulling these brakes apart and maybe doing a brake job These Are drum brakes and I don't think I've ever done a set of drum brakes before lucky me look at that you can see how new this tire is it still has remnants of the tire sticker so before I can remove the brake drum I have to back off this adjusting screw back here luckily it is moving that's really good news I was worried it would be seized there's a piece of broken shoe here okay so overall these brakes look like they're in pretty good shape I mean there's plenty of material here on the shoes they are broken a little bit up here some of the shoe material came off and this piece right here was actually wedged in there so that might have been causing this to be too tight up here which could have caused the wheels to seize overall the vehicle's been sitting for a while so that's probably why so I think what I'm gonna do is just adjust it properly and we'll see if the wheel spins foreign at this point okay so the fan belt in here is completely broken at this point so that's the very first thing I need to deal with now foreign that's what I decided to name the thing got a new heavy duty belt tensioner and I think this is an idler pulley only Quality Parts Continental Motorcraft and Gates first The Idler pulley looks like it's the easiest to get to ah I have never personally had a belt fail like this before foreign the torque spec on this one is definitely good and tight click click well I literally just broke this t50 Torx trying to remove the tensioner and so I think I'm just gonna have to run with the old tensioner for now that pulley definitely doesn't sound great but I guess it'll work in the short term all right never mind I did manage to get it off this bolt here was seized in the aluminum part of the tensioner so that's why it was so difficult to get off what a pain our current while I'm at it let's throw a new air filter in this thing all right let's not throw a new air filter in it well I got this thing up on jack stands to give myself a little more space underneath it while I work I would love to get this thing in the shop but unfortunately it is full of Range Rover at the moment so this thing's not really running all that great at the moment quite a bit foreign [Music] okay I'm curious to see how clogged this filter is so the new one I can blow through it really easily the old filter oh it's very hard to blow through and there's a lot of nasty Brown crap coming out of it so I think this filter really needed to be changed flow goes in the direction of the arrow foreign [Music] next it's time to change the transmission fluid and filter and figure out how to make a new dipstick okay so this transmission doesn't have a drain plug which means I have to just pull the pan off and try not to make too much of a mess so I'm going to loosen the bolts a little bit without removing them on me this transmission fluid looks like almost completely black I have never seen anything that bad looking coming out of a transmission anyway I'm doing it remove the front bolt here oh that's so nasty well there's the other end of the dipstick I wonder if I can reuse any of it is it [Music] this is what's left of it all right I bought some materials to try to make a new dipstick [Music] [Music] looks good [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] the fluid level should be right where the oil pan meets the transmission housing so that should be right here okay so I'm going to put the cold level marker right where that Mark is that I drew and then over here on the other end I'm going to crimp these together right here at this Mark all right well there we go so this on one end and then I have the original dipstick uh measurement thingy on the other end and it should be the right length unfortunately I can't get the new dipstick all the way into the tube because there's just too much friction the tube is really rusty on the inside and it's very long and it has lots of bends so this is just not gonna work I also can't remove the tube easily because there's one bolt that is just a nightmare to get to I already tried to remove it and I gave up on that inside the cab you do have pretty good access to the middle bit of the tube that's this one right here I hope my stepdad isn't going to be mad when he sees this all right so this is going to be where the new transmission dipstick is you'll have to pull this cover off here in the cab but I'm okay with that well here's the new shortened dipstick it looks pretty sweet and there it is sticking out at what appears to be the right level got a nice new Wix transmission filter and I cleaned out the oil pan very nicely [Music] the engine has to be running to set the transmission fluid level properly and before I start the engine I really want to get this oil changed because the van's been sitting for a while so it's a good time since all the oil is at the bottom of the oil pan oh yeah it looks like a diesel almost with how dark this is to be honest not really a big fan of this oil filter configuration foreign of course where else would it drain all right well I guess I will give this plenty of time to drain this is definitely my favorite oil filter wrench Link in description this would make an excellent Christmas present works with pretty much all oil filters I really hope this is the right filter because they listed metric and standard threads and I got metric but it feels like that is the right one yeah we're using just a regular old full synthetic 5W30 [Music] anyway I gotta go into all the gears to circulate fluid throughout the transmission thank you [Music] now I can check the fluid level looks like we're still a little bit low I'll add some more all right finally it's the correct fluid level I ended up adding like two and a half gallons of fluid I had no idea it would take that much all right changing the differential oil first I'm going to get the fill plug out I believe this is a Dana 70 differential which is actually pretty nice all right fill plugs loose [Music] oh good there's some fluid in there actually it looks pretty good too pleasantly surprised at how good this fluid looks [Music] it looks like it's just a regular open differential so I don't need to worry about adding any limited slip friction modifier or anything like that while I'm waiting for the gear oil to change I think it's time to do a coolant flush so I noticed that the coolant looked a little bit funky when I did my initial inspection it was almost like someone mixed in some other color of coolant that maybe wasn't supposed to be in there so just to be safe we're going to change the coolant well this might take a while luckily I have all day because I'm a YouTuber well I got all the surfaces cleaned up here and I'm going to try to put this on very carefully I'm just putting these on somewhat Loosely for now and I'm going to let it sit for a little bit what maybe an hour or something to cure then I can torque them down and then uh I can fill it up with oil after that one hour later okay this cured even less than I expected probably because it's so cold out so I think I'm actually gonna wait to do the final torquing until tomorrow or whenever it stops raining tomorrow full synthetic 75 w90 Walmart only had three of these in stock look at how nasty it is inside the radiator I think this is going to need a real good flush I picked this stuff up it's not sponsored and I've never used it before so it'll be interesting to see how it works now I'm just going to fill it up with distilled water and then I can run the engine for it says to run it for at least 10 minutes I'll probably run it for longer get it pretty warm and give this stuff a chance to get some work done hey Will I let it run for probably a good 30 minutes to an hour so it got up to temperature and now I'm letting it cool down so I can drain the system while I'm waiting a couple of these hydraulic lines look like they're in pretty rough shape these are the two lines that go from the pump into the valve body I'm going to start with the ones in here right there because those are the ones that are harder to get to and then these ones over here those are pretty easy to get to it wasn't even that tight look at that got it out fantastic all right there we go got those installed they certainly were harder to get back on than they were to get off all right thermostat housing down to 63 degrees so let's go all right let's see how nasty this stuff is foreign this is a before and after of the radiator flush it looks like it may have removed a small amount of the yellow sludge but not very much alright because there's so much Gunk still in there I bought another one it's the same brand but it was more expensive so maybe this will do a better job this one says that the product can remain in the system for up to four hours whereas the other one said you could leave it in for days if you wanted to so maybe this has some harsher chemicals in it and we'll hopefully do a better job [Music] here's a comparison after the second flush overall I'd say this was a disappointment and I'll be using a different product next time I decided to fill the radiator up with fresh coolant and move on to the next thing okay so this thing has a few electrical issues so the turn signals don't work either direction and then also the emergency flashers don't work either first thing I do is I look at electrical diagrams we have 92 to 96 chassis schematics and then down here is what we're looking at so we have the lights right there this is the multi-function switch that's the turn signal indicator stock we have a solid state flasher and we have fuses so let's check the fuses first the fuses are up there I checked fuse 1 and fuse five and those are both fine because of the turn signals don't work and the emergency flashers don't work I think that the solid state flasher here is a little bit suspicious we should check that next this is a little bit suspicious here three wires going to this but there's nothing in it we got a black wire a light blue wire and a white and red wire look at that solid state flasher black light blue white and red so that's it it's just missing all right I went ahead and picked this up this is a new flasher hopefully this solves the problem hmm I hear clicking flashers don't seem to be working okay look that's working now yeah okay so they do work I think this switch might also be bad as well all right I picked up a new Switch so you got the old one and the new one they look like they are indeed the same thing on the back well that was an easy install we got two screws like this and then two connectors on the back all right let's try it out I can hear clicking sounds like that's working yep turn signals fantastic okay so next none of the gauges work except for the speedometer and also I noticed that these turn signal lights don't work check engine light I assume doesn't work so it's probably all related like maybe a background let's pull this thing apart and see what we can find well I managed to get this thing apart and take a look at it but I honestly don't know what I'm looking at and the problem is that the wiring diagrams in this Chilton manual are incomplete and they don't really have anything that has to do with the instrument cluster and if you don't have complete wiring diagrams there's no way that you know what to test with your multimeter so anyway I went on eBay and I ordered a factory wiring troubleshooting manual which I hope will have accurate complete wiring diagrams in it and that'll help me get to the bottom of this in the meantime it's going to take a while to come in so I think it is time to give this thing a try before I hop up in the bucket myself I'm going to use this remote control panel here to bring it up through its full range of motion and just make sure it works that way so lower and then raise but all right you can even lower it enough to the ground so that you can get in it from down here can you guys see the flex in the vehicle when I get in this that's a little sketchy all right but I'm not tipping it over yeah it's very bouncy this is fun you can also operate multiple controls at the same time which is cool sweet next I decided to give myself the challenge of cutting a dead Branch off of one of these big oak trees all right did I mention that I'm afraid of heights and back down safely well I'll consider this a success the van needs a little bit of love but overall I'd say it's a pretty good van I'm leaving pretty soon for a rather adventurous cross-country road trip and I don't know if I'll have the video out in time for Christmas although that certainly is my goal we'll see what happens either way if you want you can follow me on Instagram and see what I'm up to in real time thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video thank you

Channel: Waldo's World

Views: 625,481

Keywords: Ford Econoline, E-350, bucket van, bucket truck, project vehicle, DIY, man lift

Id: OdaiKjMhrjQ

Length: 26min 38sec (1598 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2022