A working fridge in a Westy is a marvelous thing. I recall getting mine to work about a year after buying my van...that and the Hydro-flame furnace coming to life made me quite happy‎.

BT
Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Rogers network.
  Original Message  
From: Stuart MacMillan
Sent: Friday, May 22, 2015 7:23 PM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Reply To: Stuart MacMillan
Subject: Re: Followup to fridge troubles--success!

These things really aren't hard to work on, are they! A tune up every 30 years or so and you are good to go.

Stuart

-----Original Message-----
From: Vanagon Mailing List [mailto:vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com] On Behalf Of Jim Felder
Sent: Friday, May 22, 2015 3:10 PM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: Followup to fridge troubles--success!

I posted during the week that my fridge would no longer operate on gas.
Stuart described making a manometer, and thankfully the regulator was easily ruled out with a few bucks worth of clear tubing. I knew I had a noisy fan, so I ordered the beefy GoWesty replacement. It looks very good and was easy to install.

I pulled the unit yesterday afternoon and cleaned the combustion chamber.
Something flew out of the flue pipe when I put compressed air to them but I was not quick enough to see just what it was, I could hear it hit the combustion chamber pan. Maybe a leaf. You may recall that I had been in 70+ mph winds right before I began having problems.

I opened the combustion chamber and it had a good bit of black grit inside the burner itself, and some around the chamber. Cleaned it all up and reinstalled the unit today.

It now lights up no problem, and where it was doing good to pull a 20-25 degree difference from ambient, it was 86 today and the fridge temps hovered just over 40 degrees F.

Very happy! Thanks to Stuart, Dennis and David B.

Jim