Delica Canada | Mitsubishi Van Club

Okay, this one needs to be shared. Total bizarre, unlucky breakdown.

I was driving south on Highway 40 in Kananaskis, acting as the safety driver on a school ski trip. Driving back to the hostel at the end of a great day on the trails, and I pulled into the wrong turn. As I started turning around I heard a bang, then some grinding, then the van stalled. I was freaked out that something happened to the engine or something. Looked underneath, no damage, checked all the fluids, and oil, all good, decided to try and start it to see what would happened. Started okay, but heard a not too pleasant sound. All of the sudden saw wires flying! Shut down ASAP.

A wiring conduit had somehow hit either a fan blade, or belt, and gotten ripped out and wrapped around a pully. I pulled a bit but no luck, so I had her towed to Calgary (yay AMA gold!). Tow truck driver couldn't believe it!

Nothing important stopped working... starter, lights, heater, radio etc were all on when I re-started. All I can think is stray block heater or DRL wires. It's at the shop now, so I should know in the next couple of days. Hopefully whatever got yanked and wrapped didn't do any collateral damage.

Weird or what?

Inject lucky in there

If nothing major is damaged I will!

The L400's seem to attract a lot of miscellaneous wiring usually used for additional lights, gps dvd combos, etc ... Not always the best placement in the engine. Would be a good time to sort through any unecessary wiring under the hood at this point

So the wires twisted a couple of belts, but it looks like that's the only collateral damage.

The weird thing is they don't seem to do anything. All the major systems, and every accessory I've tried seem to work fine, mechanics didn't find anything wrong. Is it weird to have wires in there that do nothing?

Are u sure all the belts are intact? Something had to cause this to happen, and worried about what else might have been hurt. Not familiar with L400 (I know L300). How about air conditioner belt, you wouldnt notice that wasnt working till summer. Alternator belt you might not notice till battery charge dropped by being used for headlights etc. Is there a balancer belt on the L400, when it goes on L300 it is often catastrophic, causes damage from flying around and hurting other belts, then later damage is caused because the engine is now running unbalanced. Who is the Calgary engine expert (I've seen Kirkham recommended for diesel work on this website). Christine.

Yeah, it's in at Kirkham. They've gone through it. We are replacing all 3 belts just in case. Its the fact that all the electrical seems to work fine that's bugging me. I'll have to do a full test of everything when I get it back in case its some light or accessory that you don't normally see or use.

As jfarsang alluded to, the Japanese are notorious accessory-junkies and most of those accessories are stripped off before/at auction. This tends to leave a lot of wires hanging about that come from nowhere and go nowhere.

Also, the 'extra' wires may have been factory fit for a system you don't have (fitted for, not with as we said in the military for 'missing' kit) in which case you were lucky it didn't rip out or damage other systems you do have fitted.