hymer 534 rattle

[Guest patrick winks]

I have a mystery rattle that sounds as if something is rolling around under the floor. I have removed everything not bolted day from the van and the rattle is still there. Could it be coming from under the step up floor , what is under here and do you need to be an expert to remove the floor ? Someone suggested loose wheel bearings but these seem ok.

[Guest JohnP]

Patrick - Could you describe your type of vehicle a bit more including its age. I believe the floors are impossible to remove as DIY and this would probably be a factory job. Are you sure that you have removed all loose items throughout the van. Have you looked in the cavity under the seat. Found a first aid kit in mine! Does the noise sound when travelling at a particular speed, in a straight line, going round corners,accelarating or under braking? Does it happen on flat or bumpy roads? You could get a helper to lie on the floor and try to identify the position of the noise. BUT BE CAREFUL. Worn wheel bearings tend to hum/whirr and not rattle. Depending on the year/model the floor cavity holds the water tanks, heating ducting,water piping and electric wiring, plus the spare wheel.

[Guest patrick winks]

thanks John, it's a 1998 534 2.5ltd with a U shaped lounge and has a storage locker right across the back that is accessable from under the seat that goes across the "bottom" of the U and also from an outside door on the UK offside-it's LHD. This internal stepup starts just where the wardwrobe ends and is about 2-3 inches high and maintains that level to the back of the van. I can see that some water pipes and the heater pipe for the offside go in but I wonder if anything else is under it. The fresh water tank is under the nearside lounge seat and it seems ok. My wife doesn't drive and her directional hearing doesn't seem to be able to pinpoint this rattle which sounds for all the world like a bottle rolling around. The end board where the stepup begins does have screws in it as does the floor part itself but I wonder if some of the funiture has to come out first. What I would like to establish is, is there anything under this floor section that could come loose and roll around, thanks and regards Patrick Winks.

[Guest Derek Uzzell]

Patrick: Don't blame your wife, sometimes it can be extraordinarily difficult to pinpoint the location of a peculiar noise in a moving vehicle. I once curtailed a foreign trip when our Herald's gearbox suddenly began to whine. My wife, in the passenger seat, said she could hear nothing unusual, but the noise was very evident to me. After driving gingerly several hundred miles through France, hanging around Cherbourg ferry-port for several days, then driving 130 miles home, I took the motorhome to Moran Motorhomes. Sitting in the passenger seat while I drove, Roger Moran (an expert mechanic himself) immediately diagnosed a differential bearing-fault. The Herald is RWD with the gearbox at the front and the differential about 10 feet away at the back! As soon as we swapped seats it was clear to me that the whine was coming from the back not the front - in fact the symptoms perfectly matched the Haynes Manual's description of a faulty differential bearing. In my defence I can only say I had thought the noise sounded strange for a gearbox fault but that's where I believed it was coming from. Amusingly, the warranty company that was asked to pay the repair costs sent an engineer to Moran Motorhomes to report on the problem. He was shown the disassembled final-drive parts that included a bearing with a small but obvious chip in one of its tracks. The engineer was asked about replacing all the bearings as a precautionary measure. "We don't want a ****** second helping of this", said Moran's mechanic. This course of action was agreed but, as the engineer left, his parting-shot was to say that he thought a second helping would be needed as the noise (which he hadn't heard) was probably from a worn wheel-bearing. Needless to say he was wrong and new differential bearings stopped the whine. A neighbour of mine (another engineer as it happens) became so exasperated by an occasional clonking noise from the back of his car and the garage's inability to trace it that he got a work-mate to curl up in the car's boot while he drove repeatedly over the speed-humps on his factory's site-roads. Eventually the (by now very queasy) guy in the boot narrowed down the source of the noise to a particular area and a replacement damper stopped it. The moral of both these tales is (as JohnP suggests) that a 'trained ear' is often needed to trace vehicle noises and trying to do it yourself from the driving seat can be impractical. Enough of the anecdotes. I would have thought, with a 1998 B534 (presumably we are talking B-series Hymers here?) that there wasn't much significant mechanically beneath the rear floor that could make a rolling-around sound. Nowadays B-Class Hymers use a double-floor Al-Ko chassis and, before that, a sort of sub-floor arrangement that strapped below an ordinary Fiat ladder-chassis. But I think your 'van is too early for the latter set-up. Wheel-bearings, worn or loose, don't rattle and definitely don't sound like a bottle rolling about. If you've got full wheel-trims, check that all the wheel-bolts below them are still in place - if one (or more) has come out it might be rattling about beneath the trim. The noise you describe sounds more likely to be above the floor rather than under it, so are you sure there is nothing loose inside your fresh-water tank (eg. the pump) or in the recesses of the wardrobe? I suppose, as you've been on an extended trip, that you might have picked up a nice round pebble that's wandering around in a chassis-member or on top of the waste-water tank, but now we are clutching at straws. You really do need to refine the parameters of your search and you certainly don't want to be dismantling your 'van's floor until you are sure that's where the noise originates from. Having no doubt been suitably critical of your wife's aural directional sense, you would find it SO hard to live down if your mysterious noise actually turned out to be a bottle rolling around!

[Guest patrick winks]

thanks Derek, I wasn't being critical of my wifes hearing and I know how difficult it is to pinpoint a rattle what I was saying was that as she doesn't drive I am unable to test my own hearing,I guess I need a third person.

[Guest Gary]

If you can hear it while driving maybe the noise is coming from under the matress in the drop down bed above your head. In ours there are gaps between the slats under matress where lost items could roll about.