And now for that bullbar, and winch, and indicator harness and ......

Having thrived in the Strzelecki Desert, it's now time for our Troopy to finally get his bull bar, winch and an alarming number of wiring harnesses attached.

Step 1 for the various wiring harnesses is take the two batteries out. This isn't usually much of a deal in a suburban car, but lifting a huge diesel-starting battery that is already at chest height makes for an intersting trip to the chiropractor next day.

Step 2 is pull off all those nice bumpercovers, support braces and other things that you just paid thousands for and take them to the tip for recycling (anyone need a second hand bumper wing?)



Alas poor crush can - I knew him well. This is a bit of the mountain of parts heading for the recycling.

For some reason a new bullbar needs a new set of crush cans. Maybe because it deforms differently in an accident and so needs different crush cans to make sure the air bags work (We bought this model to get one with airbags, so it's kind of important to do everything by the book in this department)


Toyota helpfully provides quite nice little instruction booklets with the parts - which is just as well, given that to get the trailer lights to work, you first have to install an indicator relay system in the engine bay; then run a chassis harness that snakes the full length of the troopy to the back; then attach it to the breakout plug in the trailer wiring harness; then .... you following this? suffice to say that things aren't as simple as they once were and adding almost any new bits - even genuine parts - takes longer than it used to. Still, once they're installed, they tend to do more fancy things, more reliably than back in the sixties.



Now, which one do I read first.

Most of these are pretty good, but there seem to be about three winch fitting ones - which you need to read symultaneously while balancing 40 kg winches and tightening nuts to 77 Nm with a very long bar.