Saturday, Sep 21, 2013 at 21:41
I referred to those photos as general information for anyone reading this thread. They did not contain any broken
Ranger parts but the fact remains a hell of a lot of cars do break in the Outback and most of the problems are caused by people taking their cars outside their design limits. All of those workshops like the one at Mt Dare are not there to fix broken locally owned cars. It is the tourists who keep them going and many of them think everything they have done to their cars is ok because they saw it in magazines.
I noticed one of the magazines ran a story not all that long ago about a Hilux breaking its rear axle housing in half in the Simpson. I dismantled a mid 90s Lux axle recently and decided to place the bare housing on my bathroom scales. It weighed 20 kgs. That is not a lot of material to be supporting the weight that some people put on them. It works if the car is loaded within the factory limits but one major problem is what are those limits on different road surfaces? I asked Toyota a question about the towing limits on my car and was told not to tow at all on soft dry sand! There was nothing about that in the book, just a maximum limit and advice about a WDH above a certain weight on the ball. Had I asked them about its carrying capacity, I am sure there would have been some restrictions on some road surfaces.
I mentioned towing 3350 kg over the Simpson with a
Ranger because that is an obvious restriction. The book does not say don't do it though so the question remains: how far down do you have to reduce the weight before the car can handle it?
I noticed your book says don't tow 3000kg above 100 kph. That is another restriction however the information still falls short of the mark. It does not state what the 3000kg object can be.
Not far north of
my home is the F3 freeway leading out of
Sydney. One section contains long steep down
hill runs that come out of
rock cuttings onto a long 75 metre high bridge that is often subjected to high cross winds. It is a notorious location for caravan accidents. A
Ranger could go hurtling down from either end towing a 3000kg work trailer full of bricks and not have any problems no matter how high the winds are. If it were to try it at anything above about 90 kph with something as bulky as a 3000 kg caravan, there would be a very real chance of it becoming another statistic. It can tow 3000 kg but it is not big and heavy enough to control a van of that weight if the van is ever knocked off course at high speed by wind or a sudden change in direction of the car. The swinging van simply grabs onto the long lever [the distance from the axle back to the tow ball] that is so common on the back of many utes and really gives the car a good "wag". Towing a van of the
Ranger's maximum capacity is big American pickup territory. Vehicles of that type have the necessary long wheel base and weight to hold the front of the van steady when things go pear shaped.
That is why little sub two ton dual cabs don't have a good safety record when it comes to towing long heavy vans.
The books never tell you this though so many keep bringing it up on forums like this in the hope that it might save someone one day.
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