damienperu
Observer
I want to say I read somewhere that the dual battery trucks came from the factory with the fender vent there, but I really can't remember where I saw that.
mine wasn't a dual battery and it had one, i think i looked up my old vehicle the EPC and couldn't find mention of it, but i might be thinking about something else. either way, being the late 80's it wouldn't suprize me one bit even if a couple of toyota dealers in australia back then just did the mod themselves on teh hunch it would reduce overheating issues (which i still had many of in tropical north queensland)
I plan on removing as much of the trim that I can before paint to chase down rust. Looks like there might be some around the windscreen from other pics I've seen of the truck, so I'm planning on pulling that as well.
yeah if this will be a keeper, i'd plan on doing a full strip down, bit of sandblasting and repaint before you spend another dime on it. in the photo I can see evidence that it's had a ''to sell" paint job. old australian 4x4s from teh 70's-90's era are notorious for a high risk of having done a lot of beach driving. not all of them are necessarily bad, but you have a huge percentage of the population with a 4x4s living near the salty-aired coast, and most of them, especially in queensland and western australia, enjoy getting out camping and fishing on the beaches. its tightened up in the last 15 years, but the in 80's and 90's you could drive on just about any beach anywhere. I would say vehicles from the greater brisbane area are particularly risky, as you have five huge sand islands (fraser, bribie, moreton, nth/sth stradbroke) that offer many hundreds of kilometers of legal nearby beach driving on surf beaches for residents in that area.
if it has some dubious rust repairs, tell me the name of the newspaper they used to hold the filler in place and i can tell you where it used to live!