RV FEATURE
QUALITY ALL TERRAIN TYRES
The standard tyres on your 4WD are also likely to be a compromise, designed for general driving on sealed roads. They will have soft sidewalls to give you a smoother ride. They are fine for tootling around town and the occasional foray down a dirt road, but for long-term touring, load carrying capacity and resistance to damage from Australia’ s harsh conditions, a good set of brandname all-terrain tyres is a must.
In fact, I know from experience that spending a bit more on good tyres will save you thousands over the longer term. We’ ve always fitted BF Goodrich tyres to our Land Cruiser, and over six years of touring, including some of the country’ s longest and toughest outback tracks, we’ ve only ever had one puncture.
Offroad travel puts a lot of strain on your engine and gearbox. We fitted a ScanGuage and an exhaust temperature monitor to keep an eye on the vehicle’ s vital components.
SCANGAUGE
Here’ s a fun thing to try. Have a look at the dashboard of your 4WD. It will likely have gauges for the basics like speed, engine revs, fuel, water temp and, if you’ re lucky, alternator voltage. The rest will be a multitude of warning lights that make a brief appearance when you turn on the ignition or when a fault becomes too serious to ignore and often, when the damage has already been done.
Fitting a ScanGauge or similar device allows you to monitor some of the vital data as it changes. These clever devices plug into your vehicle’ s OBD2 diagnostics port. You can program them to read vital data like engine coolant temperature, oil pressure, but, most importantly, automatic transmission temperature.
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