Watch this 1989 Toyota Pickup Go Off-Road
Dirt Garage‘s video of a modded 1989 Toyota pickup blazing trails in British Columbia is four minutes of gloriousness.
The gorgeous, lush mountain forests of British Columbia make for a beautiful escape from the busy life of urban cities and grueling nine-to-five jobs. When time comes to take a break from it all, people go for what brings them back to their roots. For a large percentage of YotaTech forum members, that means taking their off-road rigs to play in the dirt or crawl over boulders. The smell and seclusion of the forest or the connection between man and machine is enough to bring stress levels down, and contentment up. Nothing makes a great trip better than conquering difficult obstacles in a Toyota.
For Clinton Penner of the Dirt Garage YouTube, the sentiment rings especially true. As we see in his most recent video, above, it’s four-and-a-half minutes of his Toyota crawling and dominating the rocky, steep hills near Gold Creek on Cranbrook Mountain. The first part of the video is comprised of glamour shots of his Toyota, which leads to his bubbly introduction. He tells his viewers that he’s in the mountains where he and his wife are looking for trails. To their surprise, it doesn’t take them very long at all to find them.
For most of the video, it’s him churning dirt and showcasing just how surreal the mountains are in B.C. There is plenty of water to cross to show off how tall the tires are, locks of steep and rocky hills to test the suspension and drivetrain on, and plenty of bumps to utilize the modded shocks and struts. It’s a good thing there’s a lift and taller tires in the suspension since there are many spots shown in the video that would have been seriously risky in a stock-height rig.
So, what did Penner do to make this normally docile little truck into something that makes trekking these trails look like a cake walk? Well, a lot. First order of business was to tend to the drive train. Instead of the four-speed automatic that came stock in this truck, it was swapped for a manual transmission. Paired to that, axles underneath were swapped with solid ones – hence the name, “SAS.” It’s an acronym for Solid Axle Swap. Additionally, the original motor was replaced with a classic and durable 3.4L 5VZ-FE Toyota motor. Sitting on top of the ‘new’ engine is a TRD Supercharger.
Adding to the long list of things to make this capable truck more capable, Penner added OME Rear springs and shackles from a Tundra. On the same line of thinking, the tires were upgraded to 37 inch tires to make going through his home forests that much easier. Though, even with all those mods, Penner and his wife still occasionally run into trouble. For instance, in this video, about half way through their documented venture, Penner noticed something wasn’t right.
“So, we’re almost at the top here and I parked to get Sam, and I tried to pull the brake and it was stuck,” says Penner. “By the time I managed to pull it, it was really, really loose. So, we get out and there’s a stick wedged straight in the e-brake assembly!”
After spending a good while pulling the stick from the truck, he noticed that the stick had also managed to wreak havoc on the wire for his reverse lights. Pulling it out caused the wire to break, so he no longer had reverse lights. He noted that doing the manual swap brought a need for him to re-wire the way the lights were wired, so one little stick added another item to his to-do list. Though, thankfully, it didn’t mess up the e-brake. So, he’ll have to rewire the reverse lights, but at least the e-brake survived the fray!
Other than that, the video was just a beautiful montage of the truck going through the forest like a nimble gazelle. Though, Mr. and Mrs. Penner weren’t able to reach the top, as the trail slimmed down and morphed into a dirt bike or quad trail – much too thin for his truck to fit on. Regardless, the video and his channel are definitely worth checking out for more high-quality off-road videos. If that wasn’t enough of a reason to check out it, he also lifted and made an off-road beast of a Corolla.