Cantanko

I’ve finally got round to flushing out the cooling system on the ‘cruiser before changing the radiator (it’s on the list of to-do’s before my trip next year) so seeing as the weather was particularly nice, I decided to give it a go. continue reading…

My auto box has a problem unlike any auto I’ve worked with before. When warm and in D, 2 or L, if you mash the throttle the box can’t hold on to first and jumps  into second. I noticed this problem when I test drove the car and to be honest it doesn’t tend to cause a problem given my rather relaxed driving style in the ‘Cruiser, but it can be annoying. continue reading…

Got the calipers serviced today – of the eight pistons, only one was seized and even then not badly. A bit of pounding with a hammer and an aluminium drift had it freed up in ten minutes or so, with most of the time spent cleaning out the calipers themselves, all of the oilways, seal seats and piston faces.

There was a bit of tarnishing on the pistons but not enough to cause either seal damage or concern, however I will probably change the pistons out next year – it’s been put into the maintenance schedule so I don’t forget

I’ve done about sixty miles on the new discs and they appear to be bedding in very well. There are no fluid leaks that I can find and it stops straight and true, rather unlike the way it did before the service!

All in all, quite a successful outcome

I picked up the caliper service parts from Inchcape Derby today – not bad considering the parts were only ordered Wednesday. So far, they’ve always managed to get me bits and pieces for the truck within 48 hours, which does make the sometimes scary prices a little easier to swallow! continue reading…

While I was under the car a couple of days ago changing the ATF, I spotted that the cooler lines to the rear passenger heater matrix were basically two cylindrical rust formations. Given how effective the main heater is anway, I decided it would be a good stop-gap to just pull the rear heater out of circuit. continue reading…

As part of the rolling maintenance I’m doing (there’s no way I could afford to do all of this in one go!) the next thing on the list was the tranny fluid.

The fluid that was in it didn’t smell burned at all, but it was a bit murky. 10L of Morris Dexron III ATF was purchased from Foreign Autoparts (it was a good £10 cheaper to buy from them than directly from Morris!) and the fun of warming the vehicle up (drive up a good hill for a bit!), draining the fluid, refilling and repeating was done. I did two drain / fill cycles with about 4.5 litres used each time, however I’ll probably do another in a couple of hundred miles to see how it’s holding up.

OK – first up a warning: If you own an 80-series Land Cruiser with a 12-valve 1HD-T diesel and you don’t know when the bearings were last changed, do them now. Seriously – right now. Go. RUN!

I’d been mooching around on the Toyota Landcruiser Owners’ Club UK forums for a few months before I actually bought my 80-series and found that one of the things that constantly came up in conversation was big-end bearings (or BEBs). For the non-mechanically minded, these are little semicircular soft-metal bearings that live between the big end of the connecting rod and the crank.

Their good condition is critical to a happy engine as failure of them can be mechanically catastrophic and cause major engine damage, the most spectacular of which is probably a connecting rod making a bid for freedom by bashing a hole through the side of the engine block. If that happens, it’s basically bye-bye engine and one of the few things that can be an uneconomical repair for an 80-series. continue reading…