Our Creative Conversion and GVM upgrade

I have been troubled by the weight we were carrying and the desire to do the right thing legally. We have travelled everywhere with our vehicle without any real issues but were always suspicious that we were testing our GVM. Our vehicle has been more than capable of what we asked of it and has done just over 100,000k in our ten years of ownership. All this made our future travelling complicated by unnecessary worry about the legalities, in a vehicle that has plenty of life left, so we planned to do something about it.

In considering the options we were really only left with two choices a new car or a GVM upgrade (there was just no way I was leaving the tinnie at home to be legal or not travelling). Sure a new vehicle would be nice but it would need to be able to carry more weight then what was possible by a cruiser or Patrol. This meant I had to consider either a Yank truck or Jap commercial vehicle and to be honest both appealed to me! They are costly so I also looked at the second hand market and even importing one (yank tank). I would still need to spend a fair amount of dough on a newly purchased vehicle to make it travel ready. What was killing me on these choices was that the sale value of my existing vehicle was so low due to its age that I probably would have bought another at that price. This forced me to look at the GVM upgrade option as it had become a question of cost comparison and value to me.

There is, of course, precious little to guide you through the decision making. A lot of others appear to have wandered the very same route and it seemed they came up blank consigning the whole idea to the too hard basket. I lucked on some information that made it clear to me that it was next to impossible to obtain a meaningful increase without some major costs or modifications or both. A bit of a look around and I came up with a need for an additional set of wheels to gain the weight carrying capacity.

Having the car chopped and stretched by Creative, see

Creative conversions

And having a canopy made by concept, see

Concept canopies

The result will be GVM of 4495Kg, it is possible to take it to 5100kg but this will need an upgrade of our licenses to LR so we are still considering this.