Well as many of you would be aware Unless you have joined the blog here. With the B10 we were having issues with the Air system always running out of air really quickly, It wasn’t what we expected and was also alerted by the fact the compressor didn’t start to fill the system until the alarm was sounding which on a Volvo risked the broms brake applying to stop the vehicle to move until the air has built up.

So our original thought was that the compressor was faulty which would have been super expensive to replace. However, we noticed that this was unlikely as when it did regenerate the system it was able to do it really fast and it would fill it up to 10 bar. So this got rid of that fault for us.

Next on the list was to do an Air System clean. This is for the simple way to put it emptying all the air all the way down to 0 bar with the engine off then rebuild the pressure from there rather than a half-built pressure. What this did show was that the compressor was working fine as it filled the system in a minute or two. The other way to check the system was to empty the air tanks by hand on the pins on the side of the air tanks rather than using the foot brake The first tank I managed to do off camera was just the AUX tank and was just Air. The AUX tank does stuff like your Doors the kneeling system etc. Next to that tank is a Main tank which feeds Air gauge 1 this tank I could release on day one. I ran out of time and gave up, The next day I decided to use a spanner and use the body as a lever which managed to release that tank and I got soaked from Coldwater that came spraying out of I didn’t, however, have my camera gear with me. So day 3 was to locate the other Main tank which feeds Air gauge 2, this was well hidden and Chris was guessing where they were from the B10M which has an ever so slightly different layout from the B10BLE model. However, I managed to find the tank on the Offside just behind the fuel tank and this is the one you get to see in the film. More water came out this took a few cycles to clean out due to how the Air systems store air. I’ll explain this another time.

After all of this, the issue was an improvement but the alarm was still sounding before it should sound now from what the Air gauges were reading At this point we now though we may have faulty gauges at least air gauge 2 was faulty as it was struggling to read clearly the pressure in the tank. The next plan of attack which you haven’t and might not see depending on the footage was to resit all the gauges and make sure they have a clean connection to the sensors and the same with the sensors to unplug and reconnect them at the tanks themselves. This does seem to of fixed the issue since we have empty the tanks of water and resat the gauges the system is running as it should which are the best news the only other thing we have done with the air system was cleaned all the crap off the Air intake. All this has fixed the issues and hasn’t cost us a penny which is the best news of all.

I will now leave you with the Short video of what shouldn’t be in the air tanks.