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sparrI'm going to try to keep a journal of my adventures in owning a 1986 Ford E-350 ambulance. This is the first post in that journal, covering the first few days. If all goes well, future entries will come one day at a time.
Day 0, 2015/07/20:
I'm browsing Craigslist looking for a road trip vehicle that I might later use as a mobile-but-usually-stationary living space. I'm looking at small (Class B) RVs, as well as trucks with campers attached and vans with interiors that include a bed. I enter some combination of search terms with few results, which CL helpfully supplements by showing me results from other nearby cities. Lo and behold, 80 miles away there's a 1986 Ford E-350 Ambulance, more recently in service as a local under-utilized SWAT vehicle. I've known a couple of people with vehicles of that sort in the past, and I've had good feelings about the form factor. At $3000 I expect that the vehicle is probably well past its prime and showing its age. The photos show a very clean interior. I email and call the seller, who returns my call later that evening. We make plans for me to see it the next day.
Day 1, 2015/07/21:
My girlfriend and I take a very multi-modal trip from Chicago to Rockford, doing the last mile or so on foot. The owner of the vehicle is a nice-seeming guy, the proprietor of a local landscaping business. His business owns a large number of vehicles, many repurposed for use in his line of work. The ambulance was destined for that, but he has changed his mind. This is a good sign, rather than finding someone with just one vehicle that they needed to dump. I look it over, start it up, try a bunch of the switches. It starts up fine and idles grumbly and low. I discover that the whole ambulance box has no power, and the dash switches for that power are inoperative, including the ones that should light up when flipped. With them entirely out of commission, I have hopes that some oversight/mistake/overstep was made when removing the police accessories (siren, strobes, etc), and I assume most of the wiring was intact. This assumption is bolstered by seeing the pristine condition of the wiring junction boxes that I can get to, including one worthy of (and later receiving) a post to the cableporn subreddit. He lets me take it for a test drive in town, but I can't get it up to highway speeds. That worries me. I ask and he agrees to let me put it up on jackstands and rev it up to speed. This doesn't tell me anything about handling or torque problems, but at least I can hear it shift smoothly into third gear. I hand over the cash as we sign the bill of sale and title, he tops off the fuel, and we drive away.
I stop as we leave town to check the fluids. Oil is halfway from FILL to FULL, everything else looks good. We're soon on the highway, and it accelerates about as fast at 50 as it did at 20. It climbs comfortably to 75, and I feel like it's got some more speed if I want it, but I back off to 60-65 for the trip. It's loud, especially with the windows open, but otherwise easy and fun to drive. Over the course of the trip it develops a high pitched squeak, which I suspect to be the brakes. We make it back to Chicago with mostly easy driving, and some traffic at the end. As we pull into town I hit a gas station with 98 new miles on the odometer and put 12.3 gallons of gas in. Assuming they added half a gallon more when topping it off to so-full-it-spews, 12.8 gallons for 98 miles puts it at 7.65MPG. That's about half what my van gets on the highway. I'm hopeful that some TLC, maintenance, and holding back to 55MPH on the highway might squeeze that up to 10MPG in the long run. Rumors on various forums suggest that I might even be looking at 10-20% better than that if I swap in a more highway-friendly differential. We get home, I park it, and so ends my first day of owning an ambulance.
Day 2, 2015/07/22:
Bright new day, and another chance to play with the ambulance. I go outside to start it up. The starter turns over just fine, but it won't even pretend to try to fire. I am sad. I play with the ignition and accelerator and generally exhibit a lack of patience, starting to worry that I've made a terrible mistake. It coughs and fires once and then dies. It repeats that performance. It starts up with a clean sound, but then dies as soon as I shift into gear. I get it started and wait a minute, then shift into gear, and it drives just fine. There we go, first problem that deserves some serious attention. I spend most of the day loading half of my worldly possessions into the back, to move them to a storage unit. Along the way, I spend some time on the phone getting insurance, since my previous provider won't handle this sort of truck. I end up getting a reasonably affordable policy from Allstate. Some friends help with the loading. Towards evening, a friend and I go to drive it to the storage unit. The batteries are dead (<7V according to the voltmeters in the dash); I've left them engaged (there's a selector and cutoff) with the headlights on for 8+ hours. I drive my van over to jump start it, and borrow some cables from a neighbor (the one thing still on my shopping list for the van, now on the list for both vehicles!). The starter solenoid clicks, but the ambulance won't even try to start. The cables are heating up, so I can tell it's a resistance problem. I drag the battery across the air gap and directly connect it to the lugs in the ambulance. It starts up just fine. I rewire it back to its own batteries, and the engine/alternator chug a bit harder when I toggle the switch to bring them into the circuit. We've lost enough time that the storage unit is not an option, so we go to dinner. After dinner I realize that I noticed one of the box doors doesn't lock, which is not a great way to leave the vehicle full of my stuff (or empty, for that matter) on a city street. I take apart the door panel (super easy, metal screws through the panels into the box frame) and find the door latch mechanism to be exceptionally simple. The failed lock is just a loose rod that needs to be clipped back in. I suspect the clip is loose and it will slip out again some day, but for now I am able to lock the door and all is well for the night.
Day 3, 2015/07/23:
OK, today I'm going to get some shit done. Yesterday's to-do list had 6 things on it, of which I accomplished maybe 1.5 things (insurance and loading-but-not-unloading). I've posted to Facebook and Reddit that I need help rearranging my storage and unloading the ambulance. I've offered cash, but gotten no bites by 9AM, the start time I had listed. Showing a little more patience than yesterday, I again find the engine failing to start, but I simply pause and listen to the fuel pump whine for about 30 seconds, then give it a second try and it starts right up. Instead of starting the day's tasks alone, I go to the Secretary of State to get tags. It's a miracle that I haven't been pulled over yet for driving without them (IL doesn't have temporary plates for private party sales, you just have 7 days to go get plates), and I don't want to keep tempting fate. 10 minutes later and ~$400 lighter I've got plates in hand and a registration card for the vehicle. Lacking a glove box, I'm reminded that I need to find some way/place to store documents in the vehicle cab. Another problem for later. I stop by an O'Reilly to pick up screws and bolts for the plates (using my recently purchased handy bolt thread tester set to identify the rear plate mount bolt sizes!) and get them on with no problem. I need to check them in a few days and a few weeks to make sure my choices of metal / nylon / lock washers / etc will hold up to driving. With the help of some fellows from the Home Depot parking lot I get the storage and unloading tasks done with plenty of time left in the day. I've previously called around looking for a truck mechanic and gotten a handful of "we can't handle it, and we can't recommend anyone who can, but here are some shops that we don't know the quality of". Lacking a recommendation, I go with the shop the most others have at least heard of and that is pretty close, "B&G Truck & Auto Repair". I stop by and we chat about the vehicle for a few minutes. I leave it with him with a request to check out the A/C, tires, brakes, and general mechanical condition under the hood. A few hours later he calls me with some news. I knew the rear tires were in bad shape. He tells me how much tread they started with, which makes it even worse. I want to replace those 4 tires, he suggests all 6, and I agree. He says the brakes are mechanically sound and won't need pads for quite a while yet, and that part of the squeaking is due to it sitting idle for years and neglect of the undercarriage leading rust on some parts that usually don't develop rust. He says my options are to replace all those parts, at high cost, or just wait and see if the squeak goes away on its own after I put more miles on the truck. I opt for the latter, for now. Under the hood he mentions that the belts are in very bad shape, and responsible for the other half of the squeaking. He also mentions that there are some air pumps on a secondary belt that are meant to "improve" emissions performance (purely on paper) that I should remove to save a few horsepower later. He also says he has to get some adapters to add leak testing fluid and run a pressure test on the A/C. Tires, belts, and A/C test are going to run me $1300, which I agree to. If the A/C test looks good, there's another $300 between me and a flush/clean/replace conversion from R12 to R134a, which I'll go for since I like cold air and both me and the federal government are fans of the ozone layer. He says all the parts can be in tomorrow, so I look forward to hearing more then and hopefully getting it back.
PS: It doesn't have a name [yet?], and I'm not even sure what generic term I'll use to refer to it in the future (truck, van, ambulance, other), so I'm going to use the 'ambulance' tag for now, and I'll come back and re-tag these posts if that ever changes.
Day 0, 2015/07/20:
I'm browsing Craigslist looking for a road trip vehicle that I might later use as a mobile-but-usually-stationary living space. I'm looking at small (Class B) RVs, as well as trucks with campers attached and vans with interiors that include a bed. I enter some combination of search terms with few results, which CL helpfully supplements by showing me results from other nearby cities. Lo and behold, 80 miles away there's a 1986 Ford E-350 Ambulance, more recently in service as a local under-utilized SWAT vehicle. I've known a couple of people with vehicles of that sort in the past, and I've had good feelings about the form factor. At $3000 I expect that the vehicle is probably well past its prime and showing its age. The photos show a very clean interior. I email and call the seller, who returns my call later that evening. We make plans for me to see it the next day.
Day 1, 2015/07/21:
My girlfriend and I take a very multi-modal trip from Chicago to Rockford, doing the last mile or so on foot. The owner of the vehicle is a nice-seeming guy, the proprietor of a local landscaping business. His business owns a large number of vehicles, many repurposed for use in his line of work. The ambulance was destined for that, but he has changed his mind. This is a good sign, rather than finding someone with just one vehicle that they needed to dump. I look it over, start it up, try a bunch of the switches. It starts up fine and idles grumbly and low. I discover that the whole ambulance box has no power, and the dash switches for that power are inoperative, including the ones that should light up when flipped. With them entirely out of commission, I have hopes that some oversight/mistake/overstep was made when removing the police accessories (siren, strobes, etc), and I assume most of the wiring was intact. This assumption is bolstered by seeing the pristine condition of the wiring junction boxes that I can get to, including one worthy of (and later receiving) a post to the cableporn subreddit. He lets me take it for a test drive in town, but I can't get it up to highway speeds. That worries me. I ask and he agrees to let me put it up on jackstands and rev it up to speed. This doesn't tell me anything about handling or torque problems, but at least I can hear it shift smoothly into third gear. I hand over the cash as we sign the bill of sale and title, he tops off the fuel, and we drive away.
I stop as we leave town to check the fluids. Oil is halfway from FILL to FULL, everything else looks good. We're soon on the highway, and it accelerates about as fast at 50 as it did at 20. It climbs comfortably to 75, and I feel like it's got some more speed if I want it, but I back off to 60-65 for the trip. It's loud, especially with the windows open, but otherwise easy and fun to drive. Over the course of the trip it develops a high pitched squeak, which I suspect to be the brakes. We make it back to Chicago with mostly easy driving, and some traffic at the end. As we pull into town I hit a gas station with 98 new miles on the odometer and put 12.3 gallons of gas in. Assuming they added half a gallon more when topping it off to so-full-it-spews, 12.8 gallons for 98 miles puts it at 7.65MPG. That's about half what my van gets on the highway. I'm hopeful that some TLC, maintenance, and holding back to 55MPH on the highway might squeeze that up to 10MPG in the long run. Rumors on various forums suggest that I might even be looking at 10-20% better than that if I swap in a more highway-friendly differential. We get home, I park it, and so ends my first day of owning an ambulance.
Day 2, 2015/07/22:
Bright new day, and another chance to play with the ambulance. I go outside to start it up. The starter turns over just fine, but it won't even pretend to try to fire. I am sad. I play with the ignition and accelerator and generally exhibit a lack of patience, starting to worry that I've made a terrible mistake. It coughs and fires once and then dies. It repeats that performance. It starts up with a clean sound, but then dies as soon as I shift into gear. I get it started and wait a minute, then shift into gear, and it drives just fine. There we go, first problem that deserves some serious attention. I spend most of the day loading half of my worldly possessions into the back, to move them to a storage unit. Along the way, I spend some time on the phone getting insurance, since my previous provider won't handle this sort of truck. I end up getting a reasonably affordable policy from Allstate. Some friends help with the loading. Towards evening, a friend and I go to drive it to the storage unit. The batteries are dead (<7V according to the voltmeters in the dash); I've left them engaged (there's a selector and cutoff) with the headlights on for 8+ hours. I drive my van over to jump start it, and borrow some cables from a neighbor (the one thing still on my shopping list for the van, now on the list for both vehicles!). The starter solenoid clicks, but the ambulance won't even try to start. The cables are heating up, so I can tell it's a resistance problem. I drag the battery across the air gap and directly connect it to the lugs in the ambulance. It starts up just fine. I rewire it back to its own batteries, and the engine/alternator chug a bit harder when I toggle the switch to bring them into the circuit. We've lost enough time that the storage unit is not an option, so we go to dinner. After dinner I realize that I noticed one of the box doors doesn't lock, which is not a great way to leave the vehicle full of my stuff (or empty, for that matter) on a city street. I take apart the door panel (super easy, metal screws through the panels into the box frame) and find the door latch mechanism to be exceptionally simple. The failed lock is just a loose rod that needs to be clipped back in. I suspect the clip is loose and it will slip out again some day, but for now I am able to lock the door and all is well for the night.
Day 3, 2015/07/23:
OK, today I'm going to get some shit done. Yesterday's to-do list had 6 things on it, of which I accomplished maybe 1.5 things (insurance and loading-but-not-unloading). I've posted to Facebook and Reddit that I need help rearranging my storage and unloading the ambulance. I've offered cash, but gotten no bites by 9AM, the start time I had listed. Showing a little more patience than yesterday, I again find the engine failing to start, but I simply pause and listen to the fuel pump whine for about 30 seconds, then give it a second try and it starts right up. Instead of starting the day's tasks alone, I go to the Secretary of State to get tags. It's a miracle that I haven't been pulled over yet for driving without them (IL doesn't have temporary plates for private party sales, you just have 7 days to go get plates), and I don't want to keep tempting fate. 10 minutes later and ~$400 lighter I've got plates in hand and a registration card for the vehicle. Lacking a glove box, I'm reminded that I need to find some way/place to store documents in the vehicle cab. Another problem for later. I stop by an O'Reilly to pick up screws and bolts for the plates (using my recently purchased handy bolt thread tester set to identify the rear plate mount bolt sizes!) and get them on with no problem. I need to check them in a few days and a few weeks to make sure my choices of metal / nylon / lock washers / etc will hold up to driving. With the help of some fellows from the Home Depot parking lot I get the storage and unloading tasks done with plenty of time left in the day. I've previously called around looking for a truck mechanic and gotten a handful of "we can't handle it, and we can't recommend anyone who can, but here are some shops that we don't know the quality of". Lacking a recommendation, I go with the shop the most others have at least heard of and that is pretty close, "B&G Truck & Auto Repair". I stop by and we chat about the vehicle for a few minutes. I leave it with him with a request to check out the A/C, tires, brakes, and general mechanical condition under the hood. A few hours later he calls me with some news. I knew the rear tires were in bad shape. He tells me how much tread they started with, which makes it even worse. I want to replace those 4 tires, he suggests all 6, and I agree. He says the brakes are mechanically sound and won't need pads for quite a while yet, and that part of the squeaking is due to it sitting idle for years and neglect of the undercarriage leading rust on some parts that usually don't develop rust. He says my options are to replace all those parts, at high cost, or just wait and see if the squeak goes away on its own after I put more miles on the truck. I opt for the latter, for now. Under the hood he mentions that the belts are in very bad shape, and responsible for the other half of the squeaking. He also mentions that there are some air pumps on a secondary belt that are meant to "improve" emissions performance (purely on paper) that I should remove to save a few horsepower later. He also says he has to get some adapters to add leak testing fluid and run a pressure test on the A/C. Tires, belts, and A/C test are going to run me $1300, which I agree to. If the A/C test looks good, there's another $300 between me and a flush/clean/replace conversion from R12 to R134a, which I'll go for since I like cold air and both me and the federal government are fans of the ozone layer. He says all the parts can be in tomorrow, so I look forward to hearing more then and hopefully getting it back.
PS: It doesn't have a name [yet?], and I'm not even sure what generic term I'll use to refer to it in the future (truck, van, ambulance, other), so I'm going to use the 'ambulance' tag for now, and I'll come back and re-tag these posts if that ever changes.