We stopped the other day at a public toilet next to a slate museum in the tiny Welsh town on Llanbris. We needed to empty our overflowing chemical toilet and the environmentalist in me wanted to do it into a toilet and not on the road side in Snowdonia National Park.
After chatting to the helpful man who had just cleaned the toilet block we decided to sneak our naughty little potty into the men's, out of sight of the goings on in the area. Just as we'd worked out how to proceed in this task two men, one middle aged and one young, appeared in the doorway wearing head to toe diving suits of black rubber.
They were like lake monsters but with a better sense of humour. "Oh dear, there's been a take over" they declared at seeing two women in the men's bathroom. After some fumbling apologies and a weak explanation for our pee stained potty they told us why they looked like lake monsters and wanted to know about our lovely van Vincent.
The men, Eamonn and Albi, dive at the bottom off a water logged and disused slate quarry as practice for their summer holidays in the Mediterranean. In Wales they wear three layers including an arctic layer in order to keep warm-ish.
Curiosity lead them to Vincent and a raft of questions including fuel consumption. We discussed miles and kilometres, litres and gallons. The men took a break from the van tour to get dressed and we used the opportunity to empty the little loo into the men's urinal. That is another story....
The heroes of the story decided that we should follow them in our van to the dive shack where they needed to return their equipment and they could use the computer to do some conversions. Enter another character, John, the owner of a tiny dive shack. Over the next hour of so John, a middle aged balding, chain smoking Welshman peppered the main plot line of 'working on the van' with woes of his dysfunctional computer and stories of his son and daughter-in-law in Australia. This included photos of the woman's brain surgery to remove a parasite a week after their return. By the end of our stay I managed to plant the seed in John's head that it was probably the stop off in Thailand where the parasite jumped on board.
Back to the van.... Eamonn by now had mentioned that he was a diesel mechanic... for Ford. Would you read about it!?
When Eamonn did the maths, using the dive shack computer, and discovered that Vincent the Ford Transit was getting half the efficiency of his peers all were completely committed to solving the mystery and thus began an hour long process of working by torchlight. Eamonn banged and clanged while Albi his faithful side-kick insisted on being told every twist and turn in a diesel engine. John smoked nearby.
The culprit turned out to be a fuel leak in a small rubber pipe leading into the engine. This was dripping onto the exhaust and causing the smell, which was obvious when pointed out. This was also the probably cause of our carbon monoxide alarm screeching at us as we drive.
After some man-handling (see pic right) and a slice of faithful gaffer tape the leak was fixed but there remained a disturbing noise. The last owner had fiddled with the [enter proper mechanic speak here] to compensate for the leak. This mean the van was revving high and not using oxygen but rather burning even more diesel.
Once Eamonn finished John came with a tank of compressed air (see picture below), and a cigarette in his mouth ready to light, to clean the diesel off the engine.
Now we will wait and see how fast the gauge goes down but either way I am grateful to the kindness of strangers and sorry for all the diesel we left on the roads of Wales.
