The intercooler hose has two parts to it! Years ago I replaced the upper part, and now I’ve replaced the lower part. It’s fun teaching yourself new things.

It’s pretty easy. You need a 13 mm socket wrench, an oil pan that can hold close to 3 gallons of oil, rubber gloves, paper towels or shop towels, a new oil filter, 12 quarts of oil, and an oil filter wrench. 

I was driving up a hill on Highway 1 just outside of the tiny town of Rockport California when I completely lost power. 

I heard no sound, no change in the handling of the car, I just couldn't accelerate any more. I had just gotten into the passing lane to pass this really slow Prius, and got some weird looks from the driver as well as the cars behind me when I suddenly slowed down to 50mph, and then 45, and then 40... 

I've never worked on my car before. 

But after googling some mechanical issues for 10 minutes I'm confident I can do most of it myself. 

This was one of the first 'mods' that we did on the van that didn't have anything to do with the 'house' part of the build out. We had been driving it around for a while and realized that the stereo sucked a lot. It didn't have an audio jack, didn't take Bluetooth and only played CD's, which I haven't bought since 7th grade. So we replaced the stereo! 

Having new speakers in the van is really great. As of the writing of this post I have had them for about 2 months and they are still working just fine. The standard speakers that came with the van aren't very good so if you have yet to change them, get on it!