Glad to hear you found it and it wasn't anything expensive. It would have been fun after you found the problem to take it to a few shops to have it "diagnosed" and see how many would have tried to sell you a transmission, new CV joints, etc. A while back I took a Chevy van I owned to a local Goodyear just to get a tire mounted. As part of their "free" vehicle inspection (read "fishing trip to see what they can sell you") they informed me that they had found an oily sludge in my coolant overflow tank and I had (gasp!) a BLOWN HEAD GASKET!!! I was also told that I should not drive the vehicle until this was fixed! I had a few choice words for these idiots and told them just to mount the tire and leave my van alone, I had not authorized them to do anything other than mount and balance a tire. Needless to say, I drove the van many many more miles with no issues. For anyone in N. Virginia, this was HOGAN & SONS Goodyear, they have several locations, and I wouldn't trust any of them!     Jeff 

Jeff Stewart 

----- "Alistair Bell" <albell@SHAW.CA> wrote: 

For over a month i have had this annoying and sometimes expensive 
sounding rattle from the rear end of van, mostly when accelerating (or 
going up hill) in 3rd and 4th. David B. noticed it too when we were on 
our V. Island trip. I had nightmares of transmission problems, or 
engine internals... 

I found out what it was yesterday, it was the horizontal exh. pipe 
that runs across, behind engine, just in front of the muffler. I had 
bashed it a bit on a logging road trip and it was bent just enough to 
hit the muffler mounting brackets under just the right conditions. I 
pried it away from brackets and the noise has gone. 

Sometimes you get lucky :) 

alistair