Overland Tech and Travel
Advice from the world's
most experienced overlanders
tests, reviews, opinion, and more
Even TLCs need TLC now and then
In 38 years, the 1973 FJ40 you see above has, with the exception of dead batteries, never once failed to start and run and get me where I wanted to go. The closest it came was just a couple of years ago, when crud in the carburetor meant I had to clean the float bowl before it would maintain an idle. And one time, in Mexico's backcountry, the combination of a dead battery and bad gas forced me to replace the fuel filter while the engine was running. Scant glitches in an almost unbelievable record of reliability.
Still wearing most of its original paint, it also retains its original ring and pinion gears; until a couple of years ago it still had its original starter—a record of longevity I've never come across before. The front and rear side marker lamps? Original Toyota factory bulbs, all four of them, still burning 43 years after they were plugged in on the assembly line. Weird.
Now on its second F engine, in the last couple of years I noticed a significant loss in power, and inspection revealed low compression in one cylinder. At the same time, the H41 transmission and transfer case have been getting louder and louder with wear, also betrayed by significant slop when lifting off the throttle. So it's time for a bit of refurbishment, care of our master Toyota mechanic Bill Lee, formerly of Tucson but who infuriatingly keeps moving farther away from us, now 500 miles off in Farmington, New Mexico. Recently he called and said he had another FJ40 being trucked to him from southern Arizona, so we added ours to the shipment.
Bill is planning to install new piston rings and a new cam, do a valve job, and go through the transmission and transfer case. Anything else he notices he'll take care of as well. It will be a new lease on life for a loyal machine.
I know what you're wondering: I paid $3,500 for this Land Cruiser in 1978 when I purchased it from the original owner. Since it's now worth several times that despite 300,000-plus miles of use, it's safe to say it was a good investment, no?
Early days. Three Feathers in Redington Pass
Leading sea kayak tours in Mexico
4x4 Driving by Tom Sheppard, Edition 4
How do you review a book to which you made a small, but full-disclosure-needed, contribution? One way might be to simply avoid reviewing the bits you contributed, so that’s what I’m going to try here.
Tom Sheppard’s classic and comprehensive book on four-wheel-drive technique had its genesis in 1993 as the hard-bound The Land Rover Experience—a User’s Guide to Four-wheel Driving, sponsored by the manufacturer. I picked up a 1994 second edition, which I still own. Despite its exclusive focus on Land Rover vehicles, as an exhaustive and authoritative guide to four-wheel-drive technique in general it was like nothing I’d seen. By that time I’d owned a Land Cruiser for 15 years, had negotiated some of the most difficult trails in my region, and was using it to lead sea kayak tours to remote beaches in Mexico, yet many of the lessons—especially those dealing with driving in sand—were instantly useful.
Of course 1994 was the Paleolithic in terms of four-wheel-drive technology. Electronic traction control, then a brand new feature on Range Rovers, barely merited a sixty-word paragraph. Axle differential locks weren’t mentioned (not surprising, given that Land Rover has yet—in 2016—to embrace the feature). Hill-descent control? Electronically disconnectible anti-roll bars? Not even invented yet.
Flash forward to 1999, when Tom’s own nascent one-man publishing company, Desert Winds, took over production of the book, and the title was changed to Off-roader Driving and, in 2006, to Four-by-four Driving. Printing was changed to soft cover and monochrome to hold down the price, but each time the contents were thoroughly updated to explain the latest in four-wheel-drive systems and technology, until in the current, fourth edition, it takes up nearly a third of the book.
Why? As Tom puts it on the back cover, “ITDS.” It’s The Driveline, Stupid. Understanding how your vehicle works—how it converts engine power into traction on the ground, or how it can fail to do so—is absolutely critical knowledge if you want to exploit its full potential. Whenever I hand someone a copy of Four-by-four Driving, I say, “Don’t skip the first two chapters!” From explaining how an open differential works to investigating the astonishing traction-control system of the $250,000 Bentley Bentayga, Tom describes each advance and feature with the thoroughness one would expect from a former RAF test pilot—not sparing the criticism where necessary.
The driving sections, too, are set apart from similar books, chiefly by the overarching Golden Rule practiced by someone who has driven thousands of miles completely off-tracks in the Sahara, solo: Mechanical Sympathy. Everything from accelerating to braking is discussed with consideration for the vehicle as the number one priority. Learn the lessons here and you’ll not only be able to drive places you couldn’t before; you’ll do it with a lack of drama that will mark you as an accomplished operator. The analogy I like to use is of a pool player who has become fairly proficient at the game and shows off by slamming balls into pockets, versus the real pro who drops each ball in with a whisper, and sets his cue ball up perfectly for the next shot. Ascending and descending steep slopes, side slopes, water crossings, ice and snow, rocks, ditches—all covered.
Four-by-four Driving then goes on to a discourse in vehicle recovery, and much of this section I’ll let you critique on your own since I contributed the sections on Hi-Lift jack use and winching. Sheppard, you see, mostly eschews such crutches while playing around solo in the Algerian desert.
There is a further, valuable, advanced driving section, a primer on driving with trailers, and a useful introduction to expedition basics.
Criticism? Okay, a small one: In the last edition of the Vehicle-dependent Expedition Guide Tom allowed me to debate his, um, stubborn adherence to tube-type tires for heavy-duty expedition use. There’s no such second opinion in Four-by-four Driving, so I’ll restate here that I believe tubeless tires have surpassed tubed equivalents for virtually all practical use. A significant majority of tire problems in the field—even in remote regions—involves simple punctures, which with a tubed tire require complete breakdown to repair. A tubeless tire can be durably fixed with a plug in a couple of minutes without even removing the wheel from the vehicle, and if more extensive work is needed a Tyreplier and a set of tire irons will facilitate everything up to and including complete removal from the wheel. Any properly equipped expedition vehicle will be carrying a compressor capable of reseating the beads, so the overall time and effort spent on tire repairs is hugely reduced. There, I did my reviewer’s duty.
So—okay, I contributed a tiny section; yes, we sell this book on the Exploring Overland site. But Four-by-four Driving is simply too important to ignore for reasons of vested interest. If you are seriously interested in becoming a better backcountry driver, it’s a worthwhile investment. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go, because as I was skimming through the book to review it I found some stuff I, er, need to get caught up on.
$45 well spent. Find it here. Need I add it would make an excellent Christmas Present?
They may not be perfect, but . . .
I admit to being a tiny bit anxious as the “official” resident Toyota Land Cruiser disciple when Graham Jackson and his wife, Connie Rodman, bought a 1994 Troopy to match the ’93 Roseann and I had bought, for a trip across Australia’s Simpson Desert and further explorations Down Under. You see, Graham has lived and breathed Land Rovers since his childhood in southern Africa when the family toured the Kalahari Desert in an early Range Rover. Connie is not far off in terms of disciple-hood, and the two of them drove a Defender 110 from London to Cape Town. While Graham has no intellectual prejudice against the Toyota, it’s clear where his heart lies.
So I naturally wanted those two Troopies to perform perfectly. Statistically I knew the odds were high, but we were dealing, after all, with two unfamiliar 20-plus-year-old vehicles with 230,000 km (ours) and 400,000-some km on the clocks. And Land Cruisers in Australia tend to be used as God and Toyoda-san intended.
And perform perfectly they did. The naturally aspirated 1HZ diesels earned praise from Graham for their 20-21 mpg economy at 110kph on Australia’s paved highways, and for their effortless low-end torque once we hit the Madigan Line to cross the desert. I believe I overheard an adjective along the lines of “fantastic” a few days into the trip.
Once out of the desert and past Birdsville, we cranked up the speed again to get back to Sydney. On one stretch of highway I switched from the near-empty front fuel tank to the full rear—and about 15 minutes later the engine started faltering.
Well. Dammit.
We pulled over and consulted. The consensus was that the transfer pump in the rear tank, which simply moves fuel to the front tank from where the main fuel pump picks it up, was failing to deliver an adequate supply to keep up with the consumption at high speed. Clogged fuel filters were ruled out as the engine-compartment-mounted factory units had been replaced before the trip. It was a minor issue as we didn’t need the range of both tanks on the highway; we dumped our spare jerry can of diesel into the front tank and continued with no further problems.But was that the glimmer of a smirk on Graham’s face as he drove off? Just a minute upturn at the corners of his mouth? So, they are not perfect.
Back in Sydney we left the vehicles with Daniel at the Expedition Centre for further modifications and an investigation into the fuel-delivery problem. And presently the answer came back.
At some point in the past 23 years a previous owner had, quite sensibly, installed a cheap Pep Boys plastic prefilter in the line just ahead of the rear tank—and then forgot all about it. Daniel’s mechanic found it, cut it open, and revealed a solid mass of gunk inside. Problem solved and truck running happily on either tank. They may not be perfect, but at least this issue was definitely not a Toyota issue.
To be fair, there was one other complaint acknowledged by us all regarding both vehicles: The stock seats were rubbish, especially after a couple of decades of ample Aussie bums bouncing around on them across the Outback. We’re addressing that now; report soon.
Irreducible perfection: Sea to Summit cargo straps
I have a confession that will seem like sacrilege to some outdoor enthusiasts: I’m not fond of Fastex buckles.
Why sacrilege? If you’re old enough to remember what we had before them, you’ll understand. The common fasteners for backpack straps, cargo straps, etc., were metal buckles with a sliding toothed bar to grip the strap. They were fussy and time-consuming, and eventually rusted. By contrast, the Fastex buckle (or, generically, side-release buckle) seemed like a miracle of convenience when it was introduced.
But they’re not perfect. They’re plastic and they do break—I’ve lost count of the one-tined buckles I’ve tossed over the years, and the habit of many equipment makers to permanently sew in the buckle doesn’t help. They’re also susceptible to UV degradation: I had a sea kayak that employed them to secure the cargo hatches and every six months I had to replace them all prophylactically to ensure they didn’t start failing in sequence on a rough crossing. Constant sun exposure quickly turned them powdery and brittle.
Finally, and importantly, injection-molded buckles lack any formal kind of working load limit parameters. One is never sure just how much stress a buckle of a certain size will accept before failing—and in some applications that can be critical.
All this was on my mind when I was shopping for cargo straps to secure my (very expensive) Hilleberg tent to the rear platform rack on my bicycle for a trip through Israel. By chance I discovered the Sea to Summit 10mm accessory straps. They employ a one-piece anodised aluminum toothed buckle impervious to UV degradation, and a relatively narrow (yes, 10mm) strap. Yet, lo and behold, on the buckle was a small tag listing a working load limit (WLL) of 125 kg. That’s 275 pounds to you non-metric people—more than enough, I figured, to safely secure a 4.5-pound tent.
In use over several hundred miles, the Sea to Summit straps performed perfectly. While not quite as fast as a plastic buckle would have been for securing and releasing, it still took seconds per strap. And despite securing a load that varied from just the tent to a tent plus jacket plus two-litre plastic water bottle, the straps never loosened one millimeter. I soon stopped checking every few minutes to make sure that expensive Hilleberg was still with me.
If you really want a quick-release function, Sea to summit sells the same strap with a hook release, but I wouldn’t bother. The foolproof security of the standard buckle is worth the extra few seconds of setup time. Need more strength? There’s a 20mm version as well, with a 330-pound WLL. Each width comes in three lengths, from 40 to 80 inches—enough to secure very bulky items.
Highly recommended. You’ll find dozens of uses.
The straps are here on Sea to Summit’s site.
Hint: When using “Search,” if nothing comes up, reload the page, this usually works. Also, our “Comment” button is on strike thanks to Squarespace, which is proving to be difficult to use! Please email me with comments!
Overland Tech & Travel brings you in-depth overland equipment tests, reviews, news, travel tips, & stories from the best overlanding experts on the planet. Follow or subscribe (below) to keep up to date.
Have a question for Jonathan? Send him an email [click here].
SUBSCRIBE
CLICK HERE to subscribe to Jonathan’s email list; we send once or twice a month, usually Sunday morning for your weekend reading pleasure.
Overland Tech and Travel is curated by Jonathan Hanson, co-founder and former co-owner of the Overland Expo. Jonathan segued from a misspent youth almost directly into a misspent adulthood, cleverly sidestepping any chance of a normal career track or a secure retirement by becoming a freelance writer, working for Outside, National Geographic Adventure, and nearly two dozen other publications. He co-founded Overland Journal in 2007 and was its executive editor until 2011, when he left and sold his shares in the company. His travels encompass explorations on land and sea on six continents, by foot, bicycle, sea kayak, motorcycle, and four-wheel-drive vehicle. He has published a dozen books, several with his wife, Roseann Hanson, gaining several obscure non-cash awards along the way, and is the co-author of the fourth edition of Tom Sheppard's overlanding bible, the Vehicle-dependent Expedition Guide.