BUSTED KNUCKLES

MONEY CAN'T BUY YOU EVERYTHING, BUT LONG NIGHTS IN THE SHED CAN GET YOU DAMN CLOSE

- DAN EVERETT

STICK around the land of 4x4s long enough and you'll notice trends come and go. Retro graphics made way for matte paint jobs, but now they're cool again. Slide-on campers were replaced with swags and awnings, only to be replaced with decked-out canopies. Polished alloy wheels faded away for white and then black steelies, now we're back to alloys again.

Unlike flashing LED headlights and headboard-mounted subwoofers, some trends stand the test of time. From the earliest days of hot-rodding through to the pioneers of 4x4ing, long nights in the shed, ingenuity and plenty of DIYing on the business end of a welder is something that has never gone out of fashion.

This HiLux is the perfect epitome of everything that hard graft can create. A total build sheet that'd cost less than the price of some canopies but infinitely more capable, and absolutely timeless.

“My mate bought it a few years back,” Haydn tells us. “I was super keen on buying it off him if he ever went to sell it. It was super clean and tidy for its age. When he eventually advertised it, I jumped on it straight away and picked it up that arvy. He didn’t realise I was serious about purchasing it!”

When Haydn picked it up with nearly 400,000km on the odometer it’d already had a handful of modifications made: a set of 33s, a four-inch lift, and an uninspiring turbo setup. But Haydn had far bigger plans than that.

While the front live axle in a sea of rudimentary independent setups is something that’s made the LN106 platform legendary over the last 30 years, it’d be an understatement to say it was more than a little flawed. Poor articulation, woeful steering, and a track width far too narrow for any serious angles meant Haydn had some serious work to do on the tools to see out his vision.