nitro-gear
Supporting Sponsor - Differential & Axle Parts
We touched on this rig a few weeks back, but now with it attending it’s first event at Cruise Moab we wanted to detail the changes and additions since that time to get it ready for some rockcrawling. As you may recall we put one of these sweet Land Cruisers (ours is a 2008 model) into the fleet late last summer after selling off our long serving 100 series Cruiser. We’ve been using it to develop product and putting it together as our take on what a TRD Pro version of the 200 series would look like if Toyota had/were to build one.
Nitro Gear 4.88 gearsets are mounted to ARB Air Lockers front and rear with an ARB twin compressor mounted under the hood giving us the ability to air up the tires after a run on the trail. With Moab in the plans locking diffs were a must and the ARB units offer the strength and reliability we were looking for in this project.
This is a big Toyota and even with the lift and bigger tires we knew the belly and rockers would be vulnerable offroad. With that in mind we put a full ARB skid plate system underneath doing some minor modifications so this system (designed for the Aussie diesel model) so it would work on the US spec V8 powered cruiser. With fantastic strength to weight properties the ARB underbody skid plates give us a lot of piece of mind in the rocks and should slide over obstacles much easier as well. For the rockers we did a set of Slee Offroad units that are very heavy duty and still act as steps when needed.
Up front we used a hidden winch mount setup behind the oe bumper with a Warn 9.5XP winch running a Factor 55 thimble in the hawse fairlead. The solenoid pack was remote mounted under the hood and a Warn remote control unit added to allow winch control without opening the hood. Why the hidden mount? We just weren’t super excited about any of the winch bumpers out there for the 200 series and at least for now like the clean appearance the hidden winch setup gives us.
Nitro Gear 4.88 gearsets are mounted to ARB Air Lockers front and rear with an ARB twin compressor mounted under the hood giving us the ability to air up the tires after a run on the trail. With Moab in the plans locking diffs were a must and the ARB units offer the strength and reliability we were looking for in this project.
This is a big Toyota and even with the lift and bigger tires we knew the belly and rockers would be vulnerable offroad. With that in mind we put a full ARB skid plate system underneath doing some minor modifications so this system (designed for the Aussie diesel model) so it would work on the US spec V8 powered cruiser. With fantastic strength to weight properties the ARB underbody skid plates give us a lot of piece of mind in the rocks and should slide over obstacles much easier as well. For the rockers we did a set of Slee Offroad units that are very heavy duty and still act as steps when needed.
Up front we used a hidden winch mount setup behind the oe bumper with a Warn 9.5XP winch running a Factor 55 thimble in the hawse fairlead. The solenoid pack was remote mounted under the hood and a Warn remote control unit added to allow winch control without opening the hood. Why the hidden mount? We just weren’t super excited about any of the winch bumpers out there for the 200 series and at least for now like the clean appearance the hidden winch setup gives us.
