Building the Escape Pod
If you own or ever owned a 2010-2016 Sprinter in the USA, you can claim between $880 and $3,500 as part of a class action emissions settlement. But you have to submit the claim by October 1, 2022.
Continue reading “PSA: Claim up to $3,500 in Class Action money for 2010-2016 diesel Sprinters”
If you have a Crew or Passenger van, it’s likely that you have the rear door panels installed. These have handy storage compartments in them.
If you want to insulate behind them or install a rear view camera in the license plate area, you’ll have to remove the panels.
Just recently we realized that we never described how to do this on the site. We’ve had several people ask how to take the trim off the door handle area, so here’s the missing information. Continue reading “Removing the rear door panels on Crew and Passenger vans”
When you order a Sprinter, there are loads of different options you can choose. Some make more sense for a conversion van than others. Some come in packages which are great value. Others come in packages where there’s little additional value at all (Mercedes branded flashlight, anyone?)
Here’s a list of most of the options you’ll care about, what they really mean, and whether they’re worthwhile having for a conversion van.
Continue reading “Ordering a Sprinter – what all the options mean”
For such a big van, the Sprinter has terrible key fob reception for locking and unlocking the doors. Most of the time, you have to be within 20 feet of the vehicle for the remote control to work.
There are a couple of things you can do to improve reception though.
We made some window shades for our van a while back using Low-E. They work great but they are a pain to store. We decided to make them fold so they’d take up less space.
We tried stitching them with a sewing machine, melting them with a soldering iron, just smooshing them together, but the best overall technique was to use a hot iron on the fold lines. This is how we made it work.
Continue reading “Making foldable window shades from Low-E foil-faced foam”
There are several different types of vans called “Sprinters” in the USA. Some have badges that say Dodge, some say Freightliner, and some say Mercedes, but they were all made in the same German factory. Here’s a guide to what’s what in the Sprinter world.
We wanted to be able to listen to tunes while we’re parked up camping without running down the starter battery. When we added rear speakers to the van, we wired them with a switch so that we could use them either with the regular stereo or with a separate amplifier. Here’s how we did it.
Continue reading “Adding rear speakers that run from either the stereo or a separate amp”
We gave in. Even after changing out the front speakers and adding a subwoofer, the Audio 15 stereo that comes as stock in newer Sprinters was just not up to the job.
We chose to replace it with an aftermarket unit from Sony that has Apple Carplay and Android Auto so that we can use our phones to provide navigation and music through the stereo.
The swap-out wasn’t hard, but there are a couple of sticky points along the way. Read on for the details.
Continue reading “Adding an aftermarket stereo head unit to a Sprinter”
We’ve already written about how flimsy the Sprinter’s antenna (aerial) is. We’ve repaired ours before after snapping off part of the housing when we caught the mast on something.
This time, we needed to remove the antenna from the roof to really glue it back together properly. Here’s how we did it, and some other options if you can’t make the repair work.
The stock Sprinter stereo doesn’t have great dynamic range. It does relatively OK in the high end because it has separate tweeters, but the door speakers just aren’t big enough to reproduce low frequencies very well.
The head unit doesn’t have a dedicated subwoofer output so you have to get creative if you want to add better bass. Here’s how we did it.
Continue reading “Adding a subwoofer to the stock Sprinter stereo”