All of the brakes and drums were in poor condition. The costs were starting to spiral and it was obviously going to exceed Paul’s anticipated budget. Apart from the major items, there was an ever growing list of all the obscure odds and sods that needed replacing together with items such as radiator, heater matrix etc. All these things put more pressure on the budget and are difficult to predict until you strip it all out.
We started ordering parts. This wasn’t as easy as we had hoped for. It is a late 70’s model and is right on the changeover point with the later cab. Whilst there are lots of aftermarket parts for the earlier models, there are few for this model. As luck would have it, we landed on out feet with our local Toyota franchise. I contacted the parts manager (Nigel) at Tollhouse Toyota. He was extremely helpful and very enthusiastic. He spent hours going through the parts system and managed to source most mechanical parts. Surprisingly, a lot of the prices were not that much more than comparable pattern parts. Having reduced the vehicle to a huge pile of bits, Paul’s work situation changed giving him even less time to do the work. He had a goal to have this vehicle ready to go to Africa by the Summer 2007. It was obvious that he was not going to be able to dedicate the time needed to achieve that, so the vehicle was getting more and more of our time on it to keep it jollying along. Les got stuck in and we had all the main parts sand blasted. This revealed a very rusty front cross member that really was beyond repair. As luck would have it, we had a RHD 40 that we had scrapped earlier. The cross member was good, so that got grafted into the 45 chassis, some repairs were made here and there and then it was primered and topcoated awaiting arrival of the Old Man Emu suspension that we had ordered.
Whilst all this was going on, Paul had apparently spotted another pickup on E –Bay that was going cheap and could be useful for parts, so without looking too closely at it, he put a bid on it. He won the bid, only to discover it was in Australia! Not deterred by this, he got it shipped over. It duly arrived at our yard to be gone through. It is an older model and nothing much would crossover, it was scruffy, but had great character and wasn’t too bad mechanically, so the decision was made to get it on the road, it would be handy for lugging stuff around anyway. It was whilst Gabor (one of our mechanics) was dropping one of the rear brake drums off, that this spider fell out of the drum onto the floor and shot across the yard and hid under a pile of junk! Luckily Gabor got a good look at it, so we spent the next half hour trawling through Australian spider websites to try and identify it...
