Unbreakable Hilux A Land Rover man’s answer to his customers’ woes

When your business specialises in fi xing a certain brand of 4x4 with a reputation for going wrong a lot, using that same brand as your own off-road plaything might sound like a no-brainer. But as far as Des Hitchens was concerned, he wanted to do exactly the opposite. Not even a professional mechanic wants a truck that spends all its time breaking down, after all…

Down the years, we’ve spoken to thousands of people who do off-roading for a hobby. For a good number of them, though, it’s been more than just that – either a pastime has become a business or, less commonly, a line of work has led them into the wonderful world of mud and ruts.

Normally, it pretrty much stands to reason that if, for example, you sell winches, you’ll do challenge events rather than comp safaris. You won’t do expedition travel if you sell bypass shocks and you won’t go trialling with the ALRC if you do engine conversions.

And if you earn your living fi xing one particular brand of 4x4… you won’t be seen going out to play in another one, right?

Wrong.

Des Hitchens was already gainfully employed as a professional mechanic before he got into off-roading, fi rst on HGVs and later on plant equipment. So when he started tooling around in 4x4s, putting his spanners on them came as second nature. ‘Basically,’ he says, ‘a 4x4 is like a smaller version of an HGV. There’s not a lot of rocket science involved!’

When you do off-roading, you notice certain things. One is that people break their trucks a lot. Another is that those broken trucks always seem to have the same badge on their bonnets. Des sussed that since this particular brand of 4x4 needed fi xing all the time, there was money to be made in fi xing them.

He was of course absolutely not the fi rst person to think this. But most of the people who fi x those vehicles for a living also drive one. Well, they know how to fi x it.

Des knew how to fi x it, but he also knew how often he’d have to fi x it. So instead, for his own motor he chose one of the ones that don’t break.

This automatically leads you in the direction of Japan, of course. The home of cars that don’t break has been responsible for many a 4x4 whose reliability has put others to shame. But they don’t get any more reliable than the Toyota Hilux, especially if you go all the way back to the days before independent suspension.

In Des’ case, this meant a Mark III Double-Cab. He bought it in 2003, at which point in time it was completely standard but for some rather avant-garde remodelling to the offside rear panel done by a combination of friction and a lamp post. That wasn’t going to put him off, though, because its purpose from day one was to be an off-road project.

It was also going to be his daily driver and work truck, though, which is why you’re not looking at a bobtailed special with a coiled rear axle here. Those mods are cool, but so too is being paid to carry engines and gearboxes around and the two don’t mix ever so well.

Anyway, over the course of something like four years the Hilux was transformed into the truck you see here. It wasn’t a planned build, more a

case of bits going on as time went by, but there was still a goal of sorts: ‘I knew that sooner or later, it was going to get a set of 35s,’ Des told us.

That’s a lofty enough ambition in more than one sense of the word. And in fact, the Hilux got loftier still when it ended up on a set of 36x12.50R15 Simex Extreme Trekker IIs. A hell of a tyre to put on a daily driver, you might say, and a very expensive way of making your truck handle like a jelly – and having scrubbed off about half their tread in a bit more than two years, Des appeared to be proving your point for you. That’ll be why, even as we snapped away, he was planning to eke more life out of his precious hardcore rubber by buying a set of 35” BFGoodrich Mud-Terrains for the road.

Making room for the big tyres, and keeping the Hilux’s long wheelbase and rear overhang from turning it into a liability, a hybrid suspension set-up combined heavy-duty springs from Milner Off-Road with a 1.5” shackle lift. The springs were standard-height units, yet the overall set-up seemed to lift the vehicle by about 3”. Sometimes it’s better not to over-think things…

Chuck on a 3” body lift (which is what he did) and now you’re looking at a Hilux that’s very Hi indeed. Received wisdom on this technique has changed over time, and Des built this vehicle during an era when the whole of the off-road world seemed to be battling to see who could achieve the most ridiculous amount of articulation, but his rationale was simple: ‘It allows clearance for my tyres and also keeps the centre of gravity low, as the main weight of the vehicle isn’t lifted.’

Big tyres mean big stresses on the axles, which in turn mean… nothing, in this case. It’s a Toyota, remember? Not only did Des keep them standard, when we took these photos the halfshafts were still the ones with which his Hilux left the factory. The brakes were completely stock, too, which means vented discs up front and enlarged drums at the back, and they had enough about them never to have struggled even when towing a heavy trailer. Des did point out that he ‘doesn’t drive like a loon’ when towing, but on tyres this big you don’t need to do that for brake fade to rear its ugly head.

It’s a different case when it comes to the diffs, which are limited-slip jobs from a 70-Series Land Cruiser. Des shimmed them up to be a bit tighter than standard, too. ‘It does allow a little bit of slip,’ he said, ‘but on most occasions it does turn

all four tyres at the same speed. You have to do an extreme cross-axle at low speed before it’ll slip.’ The diffs’ ratio, which is 4.88:1, is better suited to those tall tyres than the standard units’ 4.56:1, too.

Turning the axles, the original 2.4-litre diesel engine remained in place. But it wasn’t the only thing beneath the bonnet, because Des fi tted it with the turbo from a later 2.4 TD unit.

Why not just replace it with a whole 2.4 TD engine? ‘Because the turbo-diesel had a lower compression ratio,’ is the answer. ‘I wanted to see if the original engine would hold on to the turbo, in which case I’d have the high-compression engine with the assistance of a turbo. And then I’d still have the low-down torque while the turbo’s not operating and the extra power when it is. So in many ways it should deliver more power than a turbo-diesel engine.’

He did this work about 18 months and 10,000 miles before we met him, so the engine had had a pretty good chance to throw its toys out of the pram. And so far, so good. ‘If it was going to blow,’ he commented, ‘it probably would have done it by now. That’s my attitude!’ It hadn’t been on the rollers, but Des reported better top-end performance, better pulling power and lower fuel consumption.

‘Better’ very much the theme, then. Which brings us back to his reason for choosing a Hilux in the fi rst place, really. Having made a business out of working on them, Des wasn’t fussed about doing mechanical damage to his truck. It’s just that, in his words, ‘being a Toyota, you just don’t get it.’ His customers could keep on to their hearts’ content in their brand of 4x4s that are forever needing fi xed: he could fi x them all day long, but far better to drive a truck that didn’t break in the fi rst place.