Hello! My name is Bailey and I own an ambulance that I am currently converting into a campervan. We have been making tons of progress lately so I am happy to finally start making blog posts again. This post is mostly going to be words since I forgot to take pictures during this trip.
We recently took the ambulance on its first road trip! There were a couple issues that we encountered but nothing too big. If you’d like to learn more about our first road trip, you can check out the video here.
A short recap of the main issue we were having is that the voltmeter on the dash would start to flicker below the about 13 volts it was usually at, and the ABS light would flash on and off really quickly at the same time. Eventually, my engine stalled and we had to get a new battery since there wasn’t even enough power to keep the hazard lights on.
We thought the issue was fixed after that, since nothing else really happened. We did go over a couple big potholes that made the same issue happen, but nothing drastic happened at that point. Then, on our way home from the trip, absolutely nothing happened so we really thought the issue was solved, even though it seemed like a shorting issue.
Then, we were driving back to Las Vegas for a family event, and the issue started happening again pretty badly. The engine stalled, so we pulled over and switched the battery, since we got two just in case when the problem was first happening.
After that, the issue started happening again almost immediately. We pulled over again and I felt pretty hopeless since we really did not know what the issue was.
Alex went into the back to see if any of the electrical had been exposed while we were working on it, and he saw the compressor for my air brakes, which just so happened to be visible now that we took some of the exterior cabinets out.
He realized that the shop that had done the metalwork had taken the protective cage off of the compressor and had not fully reattached it. He also realized that one of the big wires on the compressor was fraying, and had some copper exposed. The theory was that the cage was bouncing on the exposed wire whenever we hit a bump and was shorting the battery right to ground.
After he put the cage far away from the compressor, and we started on our merry way again, the issue did not happen again. I was so relieved that we had found the issue. All of my searches on the internet were saying that my issue was my alternator, but the problem was a whole lot more specific than that in the end.
Thank you so much for reading! I will be posting more consistently now that I am doing more with the ambulance! There is also a video I made on fixing the issue that you can find here, and I post almost every week on my YouTube channel at VitalVan. See you next time!
VitalVan 