Monday, March 2, 2009
The Land Cruiser has returned
My Toyota Land Cruiser (1994 FZJ80) has been living in Seattle since I moved down to Corvallis. This weekend, Whitney and I drove up to bring it down. I also had to replace the battery. I had long thought that the yellow and blue top Optimas were good batteries to have, especially for deep cycle and winch use. However much reading this Friday on IH8Mud convinced me that I should instead look at the Odyssey batteries. These are significantly more expensive, but Sears sells a rebadged Odyssey for significantly less. I wanted the largest battery I could fit in there, and there were conflicting reports of whether the group 31M would fit or not. Enough people said it would that I was willing to risk buying it and trying it out. It fit just, close, but it slid right in and the wires reached well. I do need to figure out what to do about strapping it down. The j-hooks already in the engine are not long enough to hold it down.
Once I got it down, and emptied all the junk that had been living inside it, I pulled the interior. It being the northwest in winter, there had been some moisture and it looks like one of the rain hoses leaks a little as one seatbelt was wet and a little moldy. So I pulled out all the seatbelts, the seats, the carpet, and the center console. We cleaned everything, and after the carpets dry, I should be able to reassemble the inside. I’m going to be taking prospective grad students to the coast this weekend and I’d like me vehicle not to look like the construction site mud pit it was. I thought about adding sound/heat proof material to the vehicle while I have the interior stripped, but the only great reports I’ve had about it are some stuff on McMaster Carr, and I don’t want to wait for that to come.
Next up… Solving the EGR problem. I’ve been getting a code 71 check engine light for a while now. It is indicative of build-up or failure somewhere in the exhaust gas recovery equipment. It’s intermittent and the vehicle passes emissions when it is off, so I’ve not been terribly concerned about it, but I want to get that light to go away permanently. Unfortunately, it’s a problem a lot of people have ended up through quite a bit of money at before resorting to the electrical tape over the light trick to deal with it. It sounds like most of those with successful resolution of this issue have just cleaned all the valves and hoses in the EGR system and replaced any cracked vacuum hoses. So that will be my first step, once I reassemble the vehicle.
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