4 wheelin mods

See if you can hook up with a local 4x4 club and get out and take the truck off-road. Find out what sort of terrain is available in your area, what other folks are running and see how their rigs work compared to yours. You can set up that vintage truck w/ 33" tires pretty easily and do a few other mods to make it a very capable truck. See the information and links on my web page:

-- Roger

Read the ORDFAQ. Then: Lockers.

Axel

Get good all-terrain tires and air them down when driving on soft surfaces, you can go down to 10 to 15 PSI safely, lower than 10 PSI and you risk popping a tire off the rim. (Unless you spend a bundle on special "bead-lock" wheels that clamp the tires in place.) And air the tires back up to the normal highway pressure before you hit the freeway headed home - either stop at the first gas station you see to fill them up, or use an electric compressor.

DO NOT just run out and get a lift kit, raising the truck to the sky can be the WORST thing you can do. The higher you get the easier it is to fall over sideways, and the easier it is to break the suspension. Toyota builds them rather strong at the factory, they don't need a lot of tweaking.

Changing the gear ratios in the axles is expensive, and can totally ruin your on-road fuel economy, and face it, you do most of your driving on the highway. Unless you're building an off-road-only truck that gets taken out to play on a trailer, leave the gears alone.

Make sure you have a good spare tire, a working jack and the other tire changing tools, and put together an emergency kit. Things to carry include a small shovel, an assortment of heavy plywood chunks (placing under the jack in sand, getting out of a sand hole, etc) a tow strap, flashlights and first aid kit, 12-volt air compressor...

See if there's a local off-roading club you can join, they often take excursions out to local wilderness areas and go exploring. A lot of off-road driving safely is in knowing what you can and can't do, before you find out the hard way you can't.

You're out there forcing a 2 to 4 ton elephant (AKA your truck) to dance a ballet on a greased stage, and there is a certain finesse that you need to learn.

There are going to be places where you'll need to have another person or two outside the car 'spotting' you, giving signals and directions on wheel placement when trying to drive through a boulder field without major body damage, and watching for clearance from trees or other immovable objects.

Realize that most of the time caution is your best friend - but there are also times that you have to go balls out and speed up to save yourself... For instance, if you get way off camber on the side of a very steep hill, stopping can be a sure recipe for a sideways rollover. Get the car aimed either uphill or downhill, and maneuver yourself to a safe place to stop.

And never lock the wheels up with the brakes trying to stop on an ultra steep hill - the wheels will just slide on loose dirt or sand, and you could slide right off the edge of a cliff. Again, sometimes you have to keep momentum to retain some control - throw it into 4-LOW before starting down that hill, and let the engine compression help with the slowing and stopping. Just watch that you select the right gear to keep the engine under the RPM redline when using engine braking - it's easy to grenade an engine like that.

Conversely, if you're getting into trouble don't shift gears on a stick vehicle casually - if you can't get it into the next gear, you just lost a bunch of your braking effort when going downhill, and you could lose momentum going uphill. You might have to tough it out in the wrong gear to stay alive - lug the engine or stomp on the brakes to keep it under redline.

If you haven't figured it out yet, doing it properly ain't /nearly/ as easy as it looks - the real trick is in making it look easy.

-->--