Thread: Urgent Advice - Would you buy this 4WD?

Originally Posted by imaca

@Flyblown really interested with your experience of the V6 petrol.
What would you (or anyone here) do to improve the riverproofness of the petrol engine?

Cheers

I just liberally cover the HT components in spray on lithium grease and pack the plug recesses with grease. Spray or wipe on, wipe off. The mechanics at the one mine I worked at prepared our vehicles using a bright blue spray on the waterproof coating that semi hardened. I can’t for the life of me remember what it was called but it was extremely effective at repelling water.

Our vehicles run numerous 12 V accessories under the hood and I never run into any problems from water ingress despite several quite exciting river crossings in the Pilbara monsoon.

I ran 4Y and 22R petrol Hiluxs for years in Africa and did countless deep water crossings in the Okavango. Never had a problem with a motor cutting out with suitable grease protection.

Guys tend to get freaked out about the water problem with petrol engines, which is easily solved, what they don’t think about is how they are going to look after their diffs and transmission. On a number of times I’ve leaned down unobserved and looked underneath an expensive ute after observing someone complete a water crossing - no rear diff breather extension. Which almost certainly means no gearbox transfer case or front diff breeder extension.

The other thing to triple check is the watertightness of the air intake system. I remember one guy finding to his horror that a previous owner had used a hole saw to cut a 50 mm circular hole in the bottom of his air filter housing, so that his engine made a sexy induction noise. Imagine his surprise when he crossed a river and his air filter filled with water and unsurprisingly he suddenly developed nasty rod knock… Ouch.

In the early 90s I worked for a while as a volunteer (for parts) at a legendary place called N1 4x4, north of Pretoria. I was building my overlander vehicle and was too poor for some of the stuff I wanted, so I worked weekends for it. Bloody great! They’re still going strong. They were / are the Land Cruiser / Hilux authority in South Africa, and supported the older models all the way through Southern Africa with a MASSIVE horde of well organised and cleaned spares stripped off wrecked vehicles.

(Hilux used to be manufactured from scratch in SA, Land Cruiser was either fully imported or assembled from CKD kits and matched with locally derived engines and gearboxes to suit local conditions. Nowadays the Hilux is CKD I think.)

Anyway, one of the things I remember doing was draining the transmission and drivetrain fluids on incoming donor cars. Holy crap! Many of those diffs were running on 50/50 oil and water, and the overpressure from sucking in the water made them all leak. So yeah, diff and trans breathers are always the first thing I do to a new vehicle.

When it comes to water however, the absolute best advice is don’t go in above your wheels unless you absolutely have to in an emergency… have got some priceless experiences from Cape York of guys writing off their you beauty SUVs and utes by floating them on stupid, unnecessary river crossings… Not an argument I want to take on with my insurer for a $75k vehicle (after the $10k recovery). Vehicles have max wading depths for a reason, only the very well prepared and experienced (and brave) should ignore this advice.