...I don’t know!
It’s time I started a project thread. Heck, it’s time I started my project.
My 1976 FJ40 is also my first vehicle. I bought it in 2001, when I was 18, and told everybody I was buying my mid-life crisis vehicle early. I spent a ton of money on it, I broke a lot of stuff, and eventually I had to park it at a friend’s place near college because I had to focus on school instead.
Parked but never forgotten, it sat like this at my friend’s place for nearly a decade:
(taken from Google Maps - at one point I could find it in 3 different places on Google Maps, broken down in all three)
That’s depressing, though, so how about we start with some better times? Everyone has those images in their head of how things used to be, and for a long, long time those have been what’s kept me from just abandoning the whole thing.
Here is 2002 (ish) with @green73 near the Knik Glacier:
That was a great weekend! You may recognize the river between us and the glacier from Mark Whatley’s ‘rescue’ story and his avatar. We did not make any attempts to cross. That does not mean we avoided water crossings:
By the way, that Knik silt DESTROYS anything mechanical it gets into. Keep your fluids fresh! I once had the Anchorage Hummer dealer admit to me that, when the service department was slow, they would schedule a weekend ‘wheeling trip for the owner’s club out to Knik because they knew they’d have a full shop for the next couple weeks.
Of course, being young and seeing all that rock crawler stuff on the early internet, we had to do some posing:
Funny how memory is, though, because until I started digging up the photos of this trip to post here I had totally forgotten that my non-clutch’d fan took out my radiator on the last water crossing before pavement. I got dragged home on a strap. That will be a theme here for a while.
It’s time I started a project thread. Heck, it’s time I started my project.
My 1976 FJ40 is also my first vehicle. I bought it in 2001, when I was 18, and told everybody I was buying my mid-life crisis vehicle early. I spent a ton of money on it, I broke a lot of stuff, and eventually I had to park it at a friend’s place near college because I had to focus on school instead.
Parked but never forgotten, it sat like this at my friend’s place for nearly a decade:
(taken from Google Maps - at one point I could find it in 3 different places on Google Maps, broken down in all three)
That’s depressing, though, so how about we start with some better times? Everyone has those images in their head of how things used to be, and for a long, long time those have been what’s kept me from just abandoning the whole thing.
Here is 2002 (ish) with @green73 near the Knik Glacier:
That was a great weekend! You may recognize the river between us and the glacier from Mark Whatley’s ‘rescue’ story and his avatar. We did not make any attempts to cross. That does not mean we avoided water crossings:
By the way, that Knik silt DESTROYS anything mechanical it gets into. Keep your fluids fresh! I once had the Anchorage Hummer dealer admit to me that, when the service department was slow, they would schedule a weekend ‘wheeling trip for the owner’s club out to Knik because they knew they’d have a full shop for the next couple weeks.
Of course, being young and seeing all that rock crawler stuff on the early internet, we had to do some posing:
Funny how memory is, though, because until I started digging up the photos of this trip to post here I had totally forgotten that my non-clutch’d fan took out my radiator on the last water crossing before pavement. I got dragged home on a strap. That will be a theme here for a while.
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