jrm223

This should provide for an amusing day... Hahaha! I can say that I don't miss having him around, having to explain simple things like 5 different ways and he still never understood!

It seems like I'm the only one going by the IOLM, then. Mine activates somewhere around 10K miles, I've never specifically tracked it. When the dash says "Change oil soon", I usually get it changed within a couple days of it first coming on. There's only been one time where the message changed to "Change oil now", of course I took it in after work that day (it just sits parked since I work in an office). My garage is too much of a mess currently to do my oil changes at home on this little low van; but my 2WD F350's are easy enough with a pair of ramps. But a lift would definitely be great, like y'all were talking about; or even just a pit in the garage so I can stand under it.

You could make an oversized screen with magnets along the perimeter and put it on the inside of the door, with the magnets sticking to the white paint area of the door. It'd be way larger than you need, but easily removable so you can open & close that window, since I see a latch that would be inside the screen area. Or is the frame on the window itself also steel instead of aluminum? A steel frame would allow you to bring down the size of an inside screen considerably. 99% humidity, though! May as well sleep underwater, haha.

That kit is made/designed for the models without a screen there, like in my XL. Take out the factory AM/FM/Aux radio and use that mount kit to put in an aftermarket DIN-style radio.

All my rear doors unlock from a double-press on the normal unlock button, or I can use the "rear doors" button to unlock them while leaving the front locked. If you can feel vibrations in the door while hitting the unlock button, but it stays locked, then something is probably wrong with the latch/lock mechanism in the right barn-door.

Do you remember that house that blew up in Dallas a year or so ago from a gas leak, killed a 12yo girl and injured 4 others? The gas line had been unintentionally put in across a sewer pipe, which was later rodded by a plumber. Obviously you can guess what happened not too long after. That is why sewer lines need to be scoped before rodding - it's not always "paper & sludge" or even tree roots. A buddy of mine works for Atmos and he said that after they replaced all those lines in Dallas last year, they had plumbers scoping every single sewer line to make sure that the new gas line did not go through any sewer hook-ups.

They should both be RHD format if ordered from the same country. That's why I ordered my large gen 2 mirrors from US junkyards, so they'd be LHD and wouldn't have weird problems like that, lol. Are the large gen 1 mirrors not available in the US already for LHD? I've never paid much attention to G1 mirrors to see if any have the large mirrors available here, but it definitely is an option on gen 2.

That's a full-size Transit, so some things will be different than a TC. But, for either one of the vans, I'd still recommend just buying the factory cruise control steering wheel and activate it using Forscan. Steering wheel installation & enabling CC/ASC took me maybe 30 minutes combined and I didn't cut or splice a single wire. I paid $120 for a brand new steering wheel on Ebay and already had the $30 OBD2 adapter to hook up my laptop.

Pay for the good version of what software? Forscan is free, including the extended license that allows programming. However, I saw that you can now buy a longer-length extended license, instead of doing the free 2-month license all the time. If you expect to do constant reprogramming of vehicles over a long time, then I could see the cost of the new extended licenses being worth the investment. But most of us only dabble enough to do the free 2-month license and re-up if or when needed, only takes a couple minutes of time to do it. No difference in free vs paid aside from how long the license itself lasts, but all the features & abilities are exactly the same.

There's a unit called a "Steering Angle Sensor" that does a self-check every time you start the van. A few times now, I have turned the wheel too quickly after starting the engine (during the self-test) and it sets off a whole chain of problems. Each time, I end up having to disconnect the battery for a few minutes to reset everything and get the van drive-able again. So now, I specifically wait at least 5-10 seconds before I even touch the steering wheel, lol.

I recall the smartphone version being much more limited in capability than the PC version, basically a custom gauge panel on the phone, so you ought to check into that before buying anything. They may have expanded the smartphone capabilities in more recent versions of Forscan, I don't know because it's been a long while since I looked at that.

Well, the passenger side already arrived today. Apparently it must have been dropped off at work before I left because I closed/locked the gate behind me, but FedEx system didn't email me until 7pm CST. Went back and found it & installed it right then, took about 10 minutes this time. I noticed quite a bit of vibrations on the driver side earlier today, going over regular road bumps and cracks. I'm wondering if I didn't tighten the mirror bolts quite enough, so I'll have to pull that door panel back again this weekend to check. Otherwise, it might have some small internal damage? I'll check the bolts this weekend, but beyond that it's really not a big deal. Passenger side looked fine while I drove home after putting it on, so it's not just a "bigger mirror" problem.

That little bit of red grill you can see in front of the large mirror is one of my F350's, so I actually like that the large mirror is the same format as the F350 mirrors, with wide spot mirror on bottom and large flat glass on top.

Yea, that's one thing I already noticed on my way into work this morning. With the small mirrors, I actually used the blind spot mirrors more than the flat glass while driving. But the flat glass was generally better for backing up on the small ones. With these, I actually use the flat glass while driving and both for backing up, with a much better view of the ground behind me on the large blind spot mirror.

So, I bought used large side mirrors separately off Ebay to upgrade my original small ones. I have a windowless cargo van and the small mirrors were only okay. It's one of the first upgrades I decided on when I bought the van, but it took me 4+ years & 106K+ miles to get around to it, haha. Mostly because they were so expensive still when I bought the van. Even now, I have $240 in the pair ($100 on driver, $140 on passenger, separate junkyards/sellers). If you use Car-Part, get pictures before buying! Most that I saw on there - if they had pics at all - were advertised as large, but the pics of the parts van were small mirrors, so buyer beware. Someone here posted a how-to on removing the door panel. I only remember seeing it say there are screws behind the door-pull/shut handle and the door-open/release handle, but I also just skimmed over it because I thought I would wait for the 2nd mirror to arrive before putting them on - but nope, I now have 1 small & 1 large for the next week or so (ordered the passenger side yesterday). Anyhow, I found that there were 2 more screws - one along the bottom edge of the door and one along the back edge hidden by a little cover, just a few inches below the door armrest. Maybe I missed those in the how-to, though. Here's a comparison shot to see what the difference is really like. I tried to take them from the same spot, but it's probably off just a bit. Still close enough to help out anybody that wishes their side mirrors were better, though. Also, here's a shot from in front of and directly parallel to the van, so y'all can get a regular view of what's behind/along the van. In the large mirror pic, the corner of the blind spot mirror shows the corner of the motorhome bumper, pretty nice wide view. For anyone that might be wondering about the Anderson connector, I have 20ft 2awg jumper cables that plug into that. I get asked about diesel block heater or "electric vehicle" a lot, lol. Nope, just a 2.5L 4-banger.

I don't have all these hatches and such, just an open well currently (my previous pic had a 48" wide tool chest, but that has been moved to the back doors), but I also removed the foam & vinyl like Windguy did. I have pictures in my album that shows depth measurements with and without the foam/vinyl in my XL. Obviously some have carpet instead of vinyl, but I'd suspect the thickness is roughly the same.

Thanks for that, Don! I just ordered a passenger side large mirror off Ebay. A little more than I wanted to spend, but at least I'll be able to do this upgrade in a week or two after they both arrive.

Just be very careful buying from those wrecking yards on Car-Part - make sure to see actual pictures before buying. I was looking through there just yesterday and a ton of "large" mirrors were actually small ones, if they had any pictures at all! Personally, I think I'll be sticking to Ebay to get the other side (I ordered a driver-side already).

I bought a used 'large' driver side one from Ebay last week for $100. I still need to find a passenger side for cheap-ish now, too. Then comes the mess of how to get that door panel off, since I haven't looked it over yet as far as how to remove it. Any large mirrors listed as new for $185, I would be very wary of, they sound like the cheap aftermarket knock-offs instead of OEM. The real OEM ones are going for over $300/ea without the plastic cap (sold separately as base black or paintable), so it's usually $400+ total per side for OEM new.

Do you not understand what a cargo van is? There's no such thing as "rear passengers". And again, my windowless cargo van never had any pieces there, I just looked back through my oldest pictures from shortly after I bought it - no trim pieces, ever. But, there's also no windows on those doors for me. I just looked up photos of white vans (mine is black) that are otherwise identical to mine - look, no trim piece on vans without door windows! Like I already said before. Anybody that worried about it should sit in the back while someone drives y'all around, so you can see if it's even actually noticeable that they're off. Especially if you have one on and one off, y'all could switch from side-to-side to test any perceptible noise level difference. But I think it's a whole lot of fuss over practically nothing.

Damn! I want that for a new daily driver. Sorry Transit Connect, you're getting parked! hahaha

I don't make a living off my cargo van, just a personal vehicle, but I don't give no-windows a second thought, either. The only upgrade I want to do is the 'large' mirrors to replace the 'small' ones, for the better blind-spot mirror. I've gotten by just fine for over 4 years now with the small ones, but the extra view would be a nice thing to have. But dang are those large mirrors pretty expensive, even from wrecking yards & Car-Part - and a lot of these Car-Part wrecking yards don't know the difference, I'm seeing a lot of small mirrors listed as large... Some day, haha.

I have rear pads & rotors sitting in my van waiting to be installed. But, I also seem to have the longest lasting brakes here lol; I see lots of posts here about premature brake wear as early as 5-6K miles. I have 106K miles (bought brand new, so definitely no brake jobs in the past), the front pads still look brand new and the rears had 2mm left at 102K miles, but mostly highway miles and I've always coast down as much as I can. I bought the actual caliper compression kit that has the different adapters for about $25 on Amazon, but thank you for the heads-up that they're both clockwise so I don't have to figure it out later!

I've walked around on my roof a couple times when I didn't have a ladder handy and it really didn't buckle much at all under my weight (190lbs), which would be a localized point-load. I also didn't stand specifically on the cross-supports, either, but the open corrugated panel. So, I'd think if your rails have at least 4 connection points supporting the RTT, and of course those would be on the strongest part of the roof, it'll hold up to y'all's weight inside without any problem.

This must only be on vans/wagons that have windows in the doors or something?? I looked at mine the other day after I remembered reading this post and I didn't see these trim pieces on my 2015 cargo van. I bought it new and I know nothing has fallen off, so they were never there to begin with, lol.