Annoying whistle, 1992 Toyota HiAce engine..

[JPB]

Turn the treble right up at the 16KHz+ end of the scale if your sound card allows for this sort of thing as not everyone finds Yoda's new funny noise as annoying as I do. I can hear this at idle, as the video will demonstrate, and it's even audible with the engine cover / passenger seat closed, in spite of the engine's remarkable (for an "old school" veggie burning lump of cast iron) silence in other ways.
Enough writing, please do some listening and tell me, for the love of all things mechanically propelled, what the €£&$ is this infernal racket?


https://youtu.be/e8UP1htDr48

[sierra3dr]

With my fantastic hearing,the whistle is very faint.

[harvey]

What whistle?

[JPB]

It's audible enough on the amp & speakers I'm using here. I've covered around 180KM since earlier today and have noticed no change in the pitch or loudness of the noise, I've checked everything that I can think of but can find absolutely nothing that would explain that damned noise.

Tomorrow should yield a solution though, I'm off to buy a decent radio for the van....

[JPB]

Solution found! There was a very slight air leak between the air intake grille (four feet up the van body behind the driver's door, marvellous for driving through really deep puddles, or trips down South..) and the surrounding bodywork, the pipework must have been acting like the horn on a mechanical phonograph. Removing the gasket that joins steel bodywork to flexible pipework, adding a thin bead of bathroom silicon, then refitting has brought about virtual silence in the cab, but naturally, this improvement to my driving conditions has also highlighted at least a dozen other noises that I simply hadn't noticed earlier. Imagine; a steel / GRP composite body that creaks as it's being driven , I thought I'd left that sort of thing behind when I excavated every single kilo of Cataloy from my old FE series Vauxhall VX1800 and replaced the plop with fresh steel.
I still plan to fit a decent wireless set to the van though. It has only slightly less interior volume than the mobile cinema which serves these here parts (when its ownership committee can afford some insurance) and that means that some stupidly large old speakers and a massive, understressed a/f amplifier can also be fitted without compromising sleeping or cooking space. I'll show the Barry Boys crowd what loud music is!

[Dick]

I couldn't hear a thing...

[JPB]

I couldn't hear a thing...

Maybe, when I found the source of the noise and eliminated it, youtube's magic pixies edited the sound on the original clip to reflect the now near silent engine's absence of noises .. Apart from that rattle, but it's a Diesel which can trace its origins back to the seventies and every trip is a mobile massage session thanks to the extremely hard engine mounts, but better that than lift the seat some day and find that the engine escaped.
It could be worse, the Toyota L-series is a paragon of refinement and modernity if compared with the 300Tdi in my previous full-size 4x4, but then a barrowload of steel balls falling down a fire escape is quieter than a Land Rover Tdi lump, much as I liked the Disco.

Or, suggestion 2: Er, Rich, does Specsavers do glasses with hearing aids built into the legs, like the ones worn by the late Eric Sykes? Oh they do, do they.. Mate, BUY SOME!

[Dick]

Pardon ???

[JPB]

No pardon for you chief, go straight to jail, do not collect €200, do not pass go.

Van remains (almost ) silent following my lash up job. I say "silent" but this is a whacking great big four pot engine with no turbo to soak up the exhaust noise, a stainless steel system by LongLIfe that looks great but refuses to attract soot to its internal surfaces so is still, shall we say, erm "vocal" under load. Then there's the fact that the engine lives right under the seats, is of a design first used by Toyota in the seventies and sounds a lot like a Diesel.
I never tire of telling front seat passengers that the vibration they're moaning about doesn't cost extra..

[Dick]

Many years ago i took my then girlfriend out in one of the farm lorries to do a delivery. She was not overly happy with the vibration and noise coming from the engine which was under the seat and even less impressed when smoke started pouring out of the dash.. i put out the fire and dropped her off at home.. i never saw her again .. i wonder what i did wrong