Air bags don’t cause bent chassis
Bent Ute chassis’ are becoming more common every single day, and almost every time a photo of one is uploaded to social media, people are very quick to jump on and blame airbags for the failure. This is almost always with no knowledge of the exact incident, but they just feel that airbags are to…
20 bad habits of 4WD owners
There’s a fair bit to learn about 4WDing, and its easy to pick up bad habits if you’ve never been shown that its wrong, or the right way to go about it. So, without further ado, here’s the top 20 bad habits that we’ve seen 4WD owners make (and made some of them ourselves too!):…
How often do you need a wheel alignment on a 4WD?
You must get a wheel alignment every 10,000km. Heard that before? We have, from a number of different places and most unsurprisingly tyre shops. Is it true? Short answer no. Long answer; that depends. The sceptical answer? Tyre shops make money doing wheel alignments! What is a wheel alignment? If you’re unfamiliar with wheel alignments,…
Isuzu Dmax Aircon Evaporator failure number 2
Driving Blue Rag Range 4WD track was amazing, and I was on top of the world (almost literally) when we arrived at Trig Point, and got out to enjoy the incredible scenery. That level of elation quickly evaporated (you’ll get that, shortly!), when we hopped back into our Isuzu Dmax and realised that our aircon…
Isuzu aircon and mechanical work woes
‘Dad, why do you keep taking our Dmax back to Isuzu if they always do a bad job?’. The words spoken by my 7 year old son whilst we’re driving along are innocent and full of curiosity, but I can’t deny that he actually has a very solid point. Our aircon has just died for…
A new Viscous Hub for our Dmax
There’s a lot of very helpful information online, if you can filter through it effectively. One of the snippets I picked up a few months back was that our era Isuzu Dmax often started to have performance issues with the viscous hub at around 120,000km, and I put that in the memory bank for later…
Toyo Open Country AT3 initial impressions
It’s always exciting to get a new set of 4WD tyres, and we’re onto our 5th set on our 2016 Isuzu Dmax, mid way through our Lap of Australia. I was very close to getting the Falken Wildpeak AT3W’s, but ended up with Toyo Open Country AT3 all terrains instead, on both our vehicle and…
A second set of body mounts on our Isuzu Dmax
There are days that I like our Isuzu Dmax more than others. Today was great, until I poked my head under the Dmax (which I do often) and noticed one of the body mounts had two massive cracks in it. I continued my way around, noting that 4 of them were cracked, with two quite…
Hill descents towing a caravan; how to do it safely
There are some mechanical smells that instantly mean trouble, and the smell of brakes overheating is one you don’t forget in a hurry. On our recent drive across the Alpine Way, we went up and down some massive hills, and on one particular climb we had a relatively small caravan and 4WD go past the…
New tyres for the Dmax; our 5th set
Getting new 4WD tyres is exciting, and I always do my best to find the most suitable tyre for our application at the best price possible. This time, we’re onto our 5th set of tyres, and I settled on a tyre that I’d previously dismissed. What 4WD tyres have we run? When we got the…
Tyre Cupping; what is it, and how do you stop it?
If you’ve never heard of Tyre Cupping, or Tyre Scalloping before, don’t feel bad. It’s not a commonly talked about problem, but in the 4WD, Camper and Caravan world its quite common, and annoying to deal with. What is Tyre Cupping? Traditional tyre wear does either the centre of the tyre, or the outside, or…
Best Tyres for Sand
If there is one change you make to a 4WD to make it more capable, its to fit a decent set of 4WD tyres. However, this is not the case when it comes to finding the best tyres for sand, and whilst there is a difference, the tyre type really doesn’t matter too much. They’ll…