Well Bakes, if your not man enough to handle a 'Burb, I think this will serve you nicely:


And with your clothing optional tendencies, you don't even need air conditioning!

Toolmaker

I've seen versions to seat four - of course some here would complain about the mileage! The big drawback is filling the tank with the requisite eyedropper...

Toolmaker

Hey Toolmaker
hows the gas milage on that thing??
Is there a rugrat friendly model seeing as Bakes need's extra seats.

Cool...does it come with a gun rack?

Sorry, gun racks are strictly aftermarket.

Toolmaker

Fuels a bit cheaper in Queensland where FC comes from. Up here unleaded is $1.08/Premium $1.12/Diesel $1.13 Gas is 75c.
My old ute had a gas conversion, it cost me $1600 to put it on. But thing is I don't want anything that big. I think a Hilux/SWB cruiser will be my limit.

Diesel rocks! I wish I could afford to put a Cummins inta my burb, If and when I do a "hunt truck" it's gonna be an oilburner. The change in performance of diesels over the last decade has been dramatic:

That's the 700+hp, 1200+ft/lb Cummins from project sidewinder, the first diesel pickup to exceed 200MPH. Get this, it gets 21 mpg, and it towed a trailer to the salt flats! Here's a video of it smokin' a vette on the street... As for washing your hands with diesel, working in the machine shop, the best way I've found to get your hands really clean is to first wash your hands in kerosene and then wash your hands in dishwashing detergent to get rid of the oily coating left by the kerosene. This will remove stuff even GoJo leaves behind.

Toolmaker

Toolmaker,

I hope you've got a loooooooooong winch cable!!!

re petrol, I paid $1.15 per LITRE the other day, and that was city price - country is often even higher priced.

I'd love to see that thing negotiate some of the tight tracks in the our New England area.

Whatever floats your boat, I guess, but i like to have a bit of money left over after I do a trip!

The ex's family sheep station was 130k from the nearest town, so fuel prices are a significant factor.

"well all trucks get stuck in mud eventually - that's what winches are for!"

Sometimes there isn't anything to attach a winch cable to.

In the dry the bulldust can be up to 12" thick.When it rains it turns to very sticky mud.Some friends of mine came back through western Queensland on very muddy roads.They had to stop every few kilometres to scrap the mud from under the mudguards.The mud would stop the wheels turning,this was on the road!They were both driving Landcruisers,diesel of course.

130K works out to about 80 miles roughly. Just curious about how much of that is dirt travel. When I worked in northern NJ I used to drive that far daily, roundtrip, admittedly on the turnpike. You said it's from the nearest town, how far would you have to drive to get there? A friend and former poster here "Curtis Lemay" now resides in Wyoming and tells me "it's an hour to get to the grocery store!" Like I said before, the problem isn't the mileage, it's the obscene prices you pay for fuel. As for having money left over, I can drive from New York to Florida, about 1200miles(1930K) for about $150USD(216AUD) plus tolls - for me that's a less than a day's pay.

The last gen burb' (73'-91') had a notoriously wide turning radius, only the Dodge fullsize had a wider one. There are modifications you can perform to reduce the problem. My current one (a 98') can do a u turn on a street that's less than 40 feet wide... As for tight tracks, well NY is one of the oldest cities in the US(I think Boston is older) and even the outer boroughs have been inhabited for quite some time. this morning I went to a job interview that was on a street that must have been only 10 feet across - doesn't sound impressive until you realize there were cars parked on one side of it! Some of the streets on the North Shore barely qualify as bike paths yet you see box trucks driving on them regularly.

Toolmaker

You would have to make your own tracks for that thing of toolmakers around here.All the tracks are "landcruiser" width and anything with a track wider has to ride one wheel up and one wheel down(in the rut). That is a very rough ride round here no matter what you drive.Unfortunately suzuki's suffer the same fate round Kalgoorlie.
As for the tires recommended by toolmaker, they're pretty good for digging you bogged quicker in the common red clay mud.( ask the last 3 landcruiser owners I've pulled out of boggs.I of them I actually drove past his bogged position with my "road" type tyres to get him out.)
Whatever you buy, Bakes, get yourself a 1 1/2 ton comalong, some good quality chain, and a snatchit strap.These items all work when the battries flat, pack away fairly small, and have made sure I havent had to shout anyone a carton for a favour when I've been in 4wd trouble.
If you get an older model Hilux, whatch out for the diesels if they havent been looked after, I've replaced quite a few of them around the 150000 k mark ( 2.4's and 2.8's) for trouble with the engine siezing.Also, watch out on the hills with them, I've had a mate roll one (very experienced 4wder). He got flung from the vehicle when the door popped open on the first roll, and when the ute stopped rolling, you couldn't fit a shoebox in the cabin of the ute! He was in 1st gear low, trying to negotiate a creeek on the side of a hill on a track we'd all been through before.

Far, they make a gizmo that kinda looks like an anchor for situations where either a tree or suitably large rock is unavailable as an anchor point. It's very popular in the Desert Southwest of the US for obvious reasons.

12 inchs?! I thought you guys were talking about real mud.

That's at least four feet deep.

Yeah, we don't know nuttin' about mud here in the US... HAHAHAHA. Go talk to some of the club guys in Michigan about spring four wheelin' up in the northern pennisula. Mud there has the consistancy of wet cement. I've heard that certain parts of the Southeast, notably western Georgia are equally bad. Missouri also comes to mind. You guys are running open lug tires, right? Otherwise the mud just fills in and you get no traction. With an open lug, the tire tends to "self clean" and provide much better traction.
As for cost the cost of the tires, they're about $210 USD(303.36 AUD) each for 38.5x11.00-16.5 super swampers. The 49inch IROK's are a might pricier at 470 - 510 USD (679 - 737 AUD) depending on what size wheel the tire is for.

Toolmaker

It's 130k (80 miles) each way - on red dust. If you look at FarCanel's picture, remove the blacktop, make the road narrower, roughen up the surface and put some DEEP ruts in, you'll kind of get the picture.



If it's dry, and no-one's in front of you (dust) you can safely do about 60, and in places 80kmh. If it's had less than about a quarter of an inch of rain, you can do about 15, maybe 20kmh. Any faster and you slide straight into the drains - where you stay! Any more rain than that, and no-one goes anywhere - even very experienced drivers.



The soil in much of the Outback is a very very fine silt - a bit similar to the abrasive in a very fine grinding paste. When it gets wet, it is both sticky and slippery - builds up inside wheel wells until the wheels can't move.



Give you an idea of how slippery it is, I had to move a dozer across the road, reached the top, and as I started down the other side, lost all traction, and ended up sideways in the drain. See note above re ending up in drains. Had to wait a few days until we could get an excavator in to dig me out. I was only a few k's from the homestaed, so I was able to walk/slide home, but it was a good lesson! Local Council was NOT impressed with the damage I did to the road!! And they sent me the bill for the repairs - NOT cheap!!



I wa a bit pissed off about that, they closed the roads to avoid damage, but we were out of radio range - suppose we could have figured it out ourselves, but... Sh*t happens, and the slide was quite fun!