I Shall Overcome

Originally Published: September 2010 Words: Will Crotchley Pictures: Steve Taylor

Steering is stock apart from the Ironman steering damper. Matty had the front discs grooved which seems to improve cooling, which then improves braking performance. The rear calipers were changed to earlier 80-Series versions to fit with the 15-inch alloys

Ironman’s six-inch lift kit comes complete, and includes these monster spring towers finished in yellow. The shocks are foam-cell, which rather cleverly allows for 50% more oil, which then leads to superior heat dissipation and more consistent suspension performance

The six-inch Ironman system is about as comprehensive a suspension kit as you’ll ever see. It even includes castor correction mounting plates for the radius arms – something you’d normally be budgeting for separately

Put a mega lift on a standard panhard rod, and you’re going to be crabbing your way up the road. Something else that the Ironman kit includes is the adjustable unit you see here, which can be tuned to suit the individual vehicle. Combine this with the castor correction and those quality shocks (including the steering damper visible in this pic), and you’ve got a truck that handles better than anything on a six-inch lift has a right to

This deceptively delicate-looking confection is also part of the kit, one of the drop links for the anti-roll bar. Given the centre of gravity, which has moved significantly away from the centre of the Earth, these things have plenty of work to do

Anti-roll bars feel strongly that rolling should be prohibited. They seem to do a good job, even when the Land Cruiser is tanking it around corners on the road, yet they allow enough articulation for serious fun off-road. The extra drop, below the propshaft, gives extra lateral integrity, yet not so much that the vehicle’s picking up its outside wheel on corners

The propshafts took all the abuse for more than 200,000 miles as well as running with a two-inch lift, but the increase to six inches (which is huge, isn’t it boys?) meant Matty started noticing some vibration at the front end. A familiar sensation. He managed to solve his little problem with double cardon joints, adding about an extra inch to each prop as well as adding enormously to each unit’s flexibility. Two extra inches along the length seemed to do it

Axles are stock apart from 4.88:1 ring and pinions. This major gearing reduction was necessary because of the equally major tyre increase. The standard front and rear diff locks have stood the test of time, and Matty has only broken one CV joint – and he admits that was entirely his fault!

Rock sliders may not look the prettiest things, but they do the job. Although it seems that they arrived a bit too late to save the sills from a little involuntary adjustment

This solid rear bumper assembly came from Frogs Island 4x4 via eBay. It not only offers solid protection to the back and rear three quarters, it is also bolted straight on where the original bumper would fit. You can see the beginning of a rear winch assembly. Matty is adding a Husky winch, using his own fabrication

Seen from underneath, the Husky’s position is apparent. Once it’s got some cable on it, it’ll look a lot more like a winch and a lot less like an ice-cream maker

The rear wheelarches needed to be slightly trimmed back to give enough clearance for the larger tyres, but otherwise the body is completely standard. The rear light clusters are nifty LED units, which came to Matty via Australia and eBay again

The front end is covered and protected by the TJM winch bar, tough Aussie kit that houses the Come-Up winch. The winch can be operated from the driving seat or from an external point. The Aussie theme continues with the Lightforce 240 XGT lamps, which Matty got from that well-known outlet, ‘a friend’

Goodyear Wrangler MT/R tyres are 37x12.50R15 in size, running on DWF alloys. The option Matty has is a set of 37x13.50R15 Maxxis Mudzillas – pretty awesome off-road, and capable of being run at low pressures, but on the road they do raise questions, like ‘will we get round this corner?’ The Wranglers are less extreme and a better compromise for on and off-road use, though as compromises go they’re still more than a little handy in mud

Matty keeps the spare Wrangler upright in the boot, where its weight is causing least harm. The Waeco fridge sits in its considerable shadow. There is no rollcage as yet, but a full internal cage is something that’s on the ‘to do’ list, somewhere behind ‘open fridge and take drink’

This is part of the complete three-inch stainless steel exhaust system. It’s basically pipework from manifold to rear bumper, unhindered by boxes, baffling or a catalytic converter. This allows free-breathing and a gorgeous deep bark, accompanied by a turbo howl when you back off. Specialists Pipe Worx did the deed, which can’t have been the cheapest thing on the rig but which should see the vehicle out. Which, in the case of anything with the words ‘Land’ and ‘Cruiser’ in its name, is saying something

Toyota’s straight-six turbo-diesel is one of the best ever, and will last for ever too. The air filter has been replaced by a K&N unit and the turbo has new internals to match the tweaked fuel pump. Along with the new exhaust, Matty reckons this unit now makes around 200bhp – with more to come. Note that he’s rerouted the engine breather to a catch tank (rear left) rather than leaving it going into the air intake, though he admits that he’s not sure this has achieved anything significant

However old Toyota Land Cruisers get, they just keep on going; round the world, round the clock several times. But Matty Slinger’s 80-Series had already been around, so he figured there was only one way to go – up.

Overcoming obstacles is what 4x4 owners love doing, whether it’s a gnarly axle-twister, a ford or a climb so steep all you can see is God, who may be getting rather closer if the hillclimb fails. Matty Slinger has been overcoming obstacles all his life. His childhood sounds idyllic, since he’s spent his entire life on the family farm in Lancashire. But then, in 1992, tragically his parents made the farm into a tourist attraction. Just imagine having your home and workplace turned into a tourist attraction.

So now Matty, who’s still there, has to put up with hordes of fat tourists and sneering children while he goes about the usual farming chores – chasing criminals trying to steal the red diesel, working round the clock in the pouring rain and wondering if they can sew his arm back on once it comes out of the baler, things like that.

Is it any wonder, then, that he’s a man with some drive, a man who wants to get off the beaten track, away from the hordes?

But we’ll pick up this heart-wrenching tale when young Matty was just a lad, surrounded on the farm by big machinery and 4x4s. The farm ran Toyotas for all the usual reasons, starting with a Hi-Lux but later graduating to the Amazon. You can see how it started. Then the farm became Windmill Animal Farm (windmillanimalfarm.co.uk) – where he, his parents and his brother still work.

Five years ago, Matty tried to break away from life down on the farm and set up an excavation company, a business he could really bury himself in. You can’t mess about in quarries in a Nissan Micra, so a short-wheelbase Isuzu Trooper became his property. It was totally standard, but that didn’t last long. In fact he hadn’t even got it home after buying it before it all changed. His route back took him past West Coast 4x4. Moth. Flame.

A set of BFGs and alloys and a front A-bar later, he managed to get home, but that was just the start. The Trooper was a work tool during the week, off-road rig at the weekends. Lift kit, 33-inch BFGs, ARB rear locker – all to help get the Trooper into what he says were ‘sillier and sillier places.’

The downside was the Isuzu had an appetite for front driveshafts. Matty spotted that mates had 80-Series Land Cruisers which were taking much more stick without breaking. Straight-line thinking: so fit 80-Series axles under the Isuzu. Common sense prevailed at the last minute and, instead of buying some of a Land Cruiser, Matty bought a whole one instead.

Naturally, he bought it from West Coast 4x4, in the same way that you buy a bit of dope from a bloke and then he sells you some speed and you keep going back for more. You couldn’t say ‘and this is the Land Cruiser you see here,’ though, because that would be a statement riddled with error. What you see here is what started out as the vehicle he bought second-hand.

In 1995 it rolled off the Toyota production line as a rather lovely 4.2-litre turbo-diesel. It was the manual model, which goes so well with the mighty diesel, and was resplendent in dark green paintwork. By the time Matty found it in 2008 he discovered that, remarkably, ‘it ran and drove like the day it came out of the factory.’

Various unpleasantries had happened to it during the intervening 13 years, although the near-200,000 miles on the clock seemed to be one of the minor ones. A two-inch lift kit and some mud tyres were acceptable, but the word ‘Cruiser’ painted down both flanks was anything but. Acceptable on a chav chariot, but not on one of Toyota’s finest. A respray, please.

Compomotive DWF alloys and 33-inch BFGs went on, along with the necessary change to the rear brake calipers so that they fitted with the new 15-inch rims. The Ironman lift kit stayed. On the breathing in and out side, a safari snorkel went on, the fuel pump was tweaked and a full three-inch stainless exhaust was fabricated by Pipe Worx – straight through, no boxes, no expense spared.

Somehow, the cloth interior changed to full grey leather – it’s a miracle – and that was that, a sound working Land Cruiser for work and play. Play included a road trip to France and Spain alongside some like-minded hoons, but sadly for Matty the hoons included his main dealer, West Coast Paul. After several thousand miles of sharing the same vehicle, Matty came back with his eyeballs revolving and his credit card doing the same.

Up went the tyre size again, this time to 35x12.50R15 Maxxis Mud-Terrains, with a spacer set making the room for them by providing another inch of lift. A Come-Up winch went on the front and a set of rock sliders kept the sills unsullied.

You’d have to say Matty had got off fairly lightly so far, but of course it couldn’t last. After a period of solid, reliable labour from the Toyota, the next phase in its life started, as these things often do, with a phone call out of the blue. It was from his dealer.

He didn’t have enough lift, did he? The phone call offered him more lift than the express elevator. What he needed, he was told, and to which he kept nodding, was a full six-inch Ironman kit, which came complete with springs, shocks, castor correction plates, adjustable panhard rods and anti-roll bar, drop links and a key to the executive suite on the top floor.

How big did it look? It made the 35-inch rubber look a bit small under the arches, that’s how big. So they had to be replaced, by a set of 37/13.50/15 Maxxis Mudzillas.

These were amazing off-road but, Matty found, a bit worrying on-road. They had to be replaced, for common sense and general use, by 37x12.50R15 Goodyear Wranglers, which settled things down nicely.

All this high rise should have meant the thing handled like a drunken sailor, but it all works and stays sensible in the corners as well as being wicked off-road. The propshafts needed lengthening and the axles stayed standard, apart from the ring and pinions which were replaced with 4.88:1 ratio jobs to compensate for the huge tyres. It all works and, unlike his old Trooper, doesn’t seem to break, with the standard factory diff locks front and rear meaning wheelspin is something he can look down upon fondly as something that happens to other people.

The transmission is all standard, and that’s a testament to the build quality of the Land Cruiser. The engine, too, on its third navigation of the clock, just keeps on going, even though Matty has upped the ante by extracting yet more horsepower from it. He did this by fitting larger turbo internals along with a K&N filter, all working with the stainless straight-through exhaust and the increased fuel flow. He reckons he’s got about 200bhp and that may be about the case. Plenty, but of course he wants more and has plans…

All in all this is testament to what Toyota have produced over the years. This one has been modded, messed up, modded some more and now has to work seriously off-road instead of pottering around aimlessly at the home for distressed Land Cruisers (all donations welcome). But it’s also testament to what Matty has achieved – and in realising his ambitions, he’s built the rig he always wanted. It’s high and mighty – and it overcomes all obstacles.

LAND CRUISER, IRONMAN SUSPENSION, LC80, DOUBLE-CARDON PROPSHAFTS, TJM BUMPER, COME-UP WINCH, GOODYEAR WRANGLER MT/RS, WAECO FRIDGE, K&N AIR FILTER