A Better Kind Of Bling
first featured in total off-road june 2017
By far the majority of modern double-cabs come out of the factory blinged up to the nines. Ian James’ L200 dates from a time when Mitsubishi had already figured out that building lifestyle trucks was good for business – but despite having only a modest level of eye candy about it, it’s about as distinctive as a truck can be. And for all the right reasons, too…
At various points in its life, the Mitsubishi L200 has had as much as 50% of the UK pick-up market all to itself. Today, it has more competition than ever, with the Ford Ranger scoring particularly well in the sales charts, but the L200 is still seen as the original lifestyle pick-up.
It’s a proper work tool, too. Which is part of what makes it (and indeed all double-cabs) so universally popular. If you’re a bloke-wot-goes-down-sewers-in-big-rubber-boots, the L200 is ready to do the job (boom boom): if you live in a posh Millgate home and have a pony club daughter called Nevaeh, you’re just as likely to have one for hitching up your horsebox. That’ll be why some L200s have steel, plastic and tough cloth while others have chrome, leather and gadgets aplenty.
So, what we have here is a truck for all classes. And Mitsubishi was the first brand in Britain to realise that such a thing could exist. Even under all the tinsel on the lifestyle models, what you find is a hard-working commercial vehicle – complete with things like compromised suspension and a huge turning circle.
As such, an L200 is the perfect off-roader for a self-employed chap in the agricultural sector who needs a hard-working 4x4 every working day – but also wants to take it out to play at the weekend. A chap like Ian James, indeed.
Ian has lived and worked in Derbyshire, Cumbria and Lancashire. Nowhere near the Home Counties, then, which we can’t imagine he minds in the slightest. Just to be on the safe side, though, he eschewed all those places and relocated to Scotland.
A man of impeccable taste, then, our Editor would no doubt say. And Mitsubishi’s marketing department would no doubt agree. Ian’s choice of transport was based on the solid requirement that ‘it had a good reputation’, although his position thaws mildly when he adds ‘and I liked the look of it!’
He bought his L200, the first-step-on-the-lifestyle-ladder 4Life model, as a completely stock truck. It had been a fleet vehicle run by a caravan company, which sounds like a relatively easy life for a 4x4 built to cope with heavier loads than that, and over time he’s introduced it to things like mud and, indeed, modifications.
Being an agriculturalist, Ian has done virtually all of the spannering, welding and fabrication work himself. But he started off fairly easily,
by bolting on a full set of Asfir skid plates.
Always handy to have around when you’ve got
a wheelbase so long it makes Titanic look like an episode of The Simpsons.
This was followed by the more usual application of modular wheels with a set of BFG Mud-Terrains, although these were soon replaced by Insa Turbo Special Tracks. Such an unsurprising move was then followed up by the more radical treatment of the transmission, steering and propshafts – which remained resolutely stock.
So presumably something has changed? Well yes, the brake lines have extended hoses, though on the front only. Quite a bit has happened under the bonnet, however, even though the engine itself is effectively standard. Standard but for a larger Allisport intercooler, at least, which went in along with a full set of Samco hoses.
It’s not just the charge of air whose temperature has been addressed, either. Ian clearly has a bit of a thing about overheating, despite the long winter nights in the land he now calls home. Thus a larger fan also joined the party, and this is controlled manually from a switch in the cabin to prevent it from spraying water all around the engine bay when the L200 goes wading.
Think that’s enough cooling? There’s also a secondary cooling fan mounted on the front of the radiator, which is wired in to a thermostatic switch fitted into the top hose. Even this has the facility to be overridden, too.
Any suspicion about Ian’s control freakery of the cooling system is fanned further when he tells you that the air-conditioning fan in front of the radiator can also be operated by a manual switch. And that’s not forgetting the second bonnet scoop to get more airflow into the engine compartment.
Think that’s enough cooling? Recently, a Peugeot 106 radiator has been fitted behind the cab. This is linked to the original system by copper tubing, with an inline pump to help the circulation of coolant, but of course this secondary system can be manually isolated from the main system.
Think that’s enough cooling? It is. We were bound to reach that stage sooner or later.
We’re not finished beneath the bonnet, however. Far from it. The 2.5-litre turbo-diesel engine has been reworked to run on vegetable oil, and the EGR valve now resides where all EGR valves belong, which is to say it’s now in a landfill somewhere.
There’s not much more to report as we work our way downstream, until we get to the axles. Oh, except that the rear one is standard, largely because as was normal on the third-generation L200 it came out of the factory with a locking diff in it.
At the front, the independent axle set-up is still there, though the transmission components have been replaced with items from a V6 Shogun. Ian did this because these units, featuring an 8” crownwheel and 28-spline halfshafts, can be augmented with an ARB diff-lock, whereas the originals can’t. There’s some useful knowledge for you.
On the ends of the axles, as mentioned, Ian has two sets of tyres, although he hasn’t yet worked out a way of having them all on at once. In reserve, and carried on a fabricated rack behind the cab, is the aforementioned set of Insa Turbo Special Tracks, while the standard L200 alloys is now home to a set of 295/75R16 Hankook Dynapros.
Yes, 295/75 – you don’t hear about a size like that every day. Though given that the old-money equivalent would be 33.50x11.50, maybe you’d like to.
At both ends, the vehicle runs a 2” lift created by combining torsion bars, leaf springs and shocks from Old Man Emu with rear helpers from Ironman. Torsion bars have been replaced with more comfortable coils on later L200s and elsewhere, and old-school cart springs clearly aren’t the greatest form of suspension if you want flexibility and/or good ride quality when you don’t happen to have a ton of pea shingle in the back. But for a working vehicle, they certainly do get the job done.
Ian hasn’t fitted any sort of cage, but there are runners down the side to spread any impact and the fuel tank has an Asfir guard to make it, probably, bulletproof. Many of the L200s you see posing around town have pretty but pretty useless running boards waiting to be fetched off by their first encounter with Planet Earth, but Ian’s has monstrous rock sliders he made himself out of steel box. They stick out far enough to keep the truck’s sills away from any tree stumps that fancy their chances, which does nothing for their Kings Road appeal but looks perfectly good to anyone whose opinion is worth listening too. And they’re not chromed, which makes them better than ever.
The protection continues at both ends with a home-made front winch bumper and rear winch mount. The front winch is a 13,000lb Winch-It number with wireless control, and both units are fitted with Marlow Dyneema rope.
There’s a second battery and a split-charge system to cope with it all, which in this case includes four roof spotlights on the front and another four on the rear of the cab. It stays dark up there for long periods, remember, like from September to April (you can tell I know the country well).
Overall then, this is a sensible, practical rig that allows Ian to do his job from Monday to Friday then go out to play at the weekend at places with names like Drumglaur and Gie it Laldy.
It’s not a flashy 4x4, this. There’s a total absence of bling and fripperies, yet despite this it has a good pedigree and looks like it ought to soldier on for many years, quietly and grittily, undaunted by bad weather or grotty roads. As we said earlier, the L200 is a truck that makes equals out of people who start out very different. But then, some trucks are more equal than others.
