Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2019 i NZ4WD

“Bunch of b.…st….ds,” I thought as I read a story on the Stuff.co.nz website about a forestry company in the Wairarapa running roughshod over our quaint but still 100 percent enshrined in law, paper road ‘rules.’ Not only did the buggers put locked barriers across one back country road east of Masterton, when the legality of the gates was successfully contested by some adventure motorcycle riders and the local council responsible for the road asked the company to remove them, the petulant pricks then dumped a pile of logs and earth two metres high further down the road to effectively do the same job... block public access to a public road. Don’t get me wrong here, either. Were it a road built by the company on land it owned (or…

New Zealand’s most popular new vehicle buy, the turbo-diesel double cab ute, was again the focus of extraordinary interest from exhibitors and visitors alike at the 51st annual New Zealand Agricultural Fieldays event, held at Hamilton’s Mystery Creek event centre between June 12 & 15 this year. From Holden using the event to officially launch its new Colorado ROX concept ute, to Isuzu running its large self-drive compound to Ford, Nissan, Volkswagen and pretty much everyone else offering variations on the recreational possibilities of adding a rooftop tent to the list of ‘must-have’ accessories for the modern TD/DC you could be forgiven for thinking that Fieldays is as much ‘motor’ as it is ‘farm’ show. Primary focus This year Fieldays 2019 was officially opened by Prime Minister the Rt. Hon.…

Sunday March 31 dawned foggy but patches of the clear, blue sky that lay beyond were already visible as I drove into Masterton and Farriers car park for event start at 8.00am. Registration was confirmation of paperwork followed by a welcome and briefing about the day’s activities along with a handout re the properties the trip was to run through/over and a few important notes to make the day go to plan. And so, with radio frequencies set, just after 8.00am the convoy of 45 plus vehicles headed out of Masterton on the Castlepoint Road, before a left turn into Bute Road, and a small period stopped while we waited for the fog/mist to clear. Up, up, up & away! Then it was into 4WD as we climbed up the…

KYB’s Tena Force line of OEM replacement struts and shock absorber has been designed with today’s hard-working, hard-driving tradie very much in mind. Designed and tested to withstand the heavy loads and environments required of tradesman utes, courier vans, and salesman wagons/SUVs, they are valved to balance industry leading heavy duty coil and leaf springs, to ensure superior vehicle stability and comfort, while maintaining excellent on road performance. Typically a Tena Force valve calibration is 20% to 35% higher/firmer for both compression and rebound movements from Original Equipment valving, offering a serious, heavy duty option while retaining the same ride height of the vehicle they are fitted to when it left the factory. Spec-wise all Tena Force strut and shock absorbers feature a twin-tube design with a hardened chromed 16mm…

Ten laps of fast and free-flowing racing on rocky forest roads where the cars touched 200 km/h, two laps of ‘hard yakka’ as the slower sandy tracks under the forest canopy turned choppy, and the chequered flag at this year’s North Harbour Woodhill 100 indeed fell on Hamilton racer Paul Smith’s Jimco class one car. Smith had to work – long and hard – for it too, improving from a start position of 60 and overtaking 59 other cars to do so. It began in silence. Almost 80 cars lined up along a skid road among cut-over pine blocks, drivers with their heads bowed or looking straight ahead. Race commentator Paul “Dink” Madden called a minute’s silence in memory of the late Alan Tutt, patron of the sport in New…

The Central Zone Club Truck Challenge (CTC) is a club activity open to all NZFWDA affiliated members. The event is run like the national trials or what was known as club champs, that is a series of short driving tests, known as “Hazards”. What it is, is very achievable to any driver of any experience in any type of vehicle, it is about turning up and driving. It is extremely cheap motorsport with a lot of seat time and often a fun weekend away if you have to travel to an event. The current bunch of women entrants has got serious this season, as was noted in an earlier article. Shona is on a health kick, Grace keeps tabs on her closest competition during the day and Kyleen has started…

Suspension upgrades has been to the fore of recent conversations with several readers asking about their options to lift their vehicle. There is so much art and science to suspensions you can become bogged down but as far as NZTA regulations go, this week at least, you can do a 50mm suspension lift without LVVTA certification. Over that and it is off to the LVVTA certifier. It doesn’t matter what vehicle you have, going further off-road is all about traction and while tyres are a part of this, keeping them on the ground is more important. Without good flexibility in the suspension you won’t keep the tyres on the ground. With no or little lift you will bottom out whereas if you go too high you lose stability and handling.…

It was a rather fresh morning recently when 14 members from Gore’s Southern Trail Blazers and the Invercargillbased Southland Land Rover Club met at the North Mavora Lake in Northern Southland to erect a sign that had been jointly built to try and encourage off-roaders to stick to the track in an area which is well known for playing and the associated mess that that makes. At the same time a small positrack skid steer was hired and some of the deeper water holes were lowered to make them look a bit less daunting for drivers, and work was also done on one particularly bad mud hole where people have been playing. After this the fencing team swung into action and fenced off three of the worst areas including hill…

The Ford Ranger and Ranger Raptor now bring Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) with Pedestrian Detection as standard across the range, to offer its most comprehensive Driver Assist Technology suite to date. After introducing AEB as standard on the Ranger Wildtrak in late 2018, the technology has been added line-up-wide as part of a feature update for Ranger models. “Ranger has established a tradition of providing class-leading technology, which includes being the first pick-up to achieve a five-star ANCAP safety rating, and in 2018 we added more powertrain choices and significant Driver Assist Technology coupled with a five-year,150,000 kilometre warranty,” said Ford New Zealand Managing Director, Simon Rutherford. “Now, AEB with Pedestrian Detection, Lane Keeping Aid, Traffic Sign Recognition and Automatic High Beam is standard on every Ranger, from the entry-level Ranger…

British venue Beaulieu’s Simply Land Rover event in June was the biggest and best yet, with record numbers of Land Rovers and rally participants turning out for the busy event which saw the return of the popular Simply Rummage and a fully-booked Forest Drive. All told, 542 Land Rovers of all ages and varieties rumbled into the grounds of the National Motor Museum for the rally on Sunday June 23rd, an increase of eight percent from 501 vehicles in 2018, while the total of 1,285 rally participants was 18 percent up on 2018’s 1,091 show-goers. The contemporary Discovery was well-represented in its 30th anniversary year within the varied Simply Land Rover line-up, from Spartan early three-door versions up to the modern-day Discovery Sport SUV. Also on show were examples of…

“We know many of our customers have grand visions of what they’d like to do to personalise their own vehicles after driving them out of the dealership, so we wanted to showcase just how far you could take a Colorado,” company boss Marc Ebolo told journalists at a special press preview a week before this year’s Fieldays event. “Our driving desire was to take our most capable vehicle, the Colorado, and beef it up to become the greatest awe-inspiring, eye-catching piece of machinery ever devised by Holden New Zealand.” “Once the ball was rolling, our marketing team, together with partners Retro Vehicle Enhancement (RVE), spent considerable time and effort bringing this concept to life – and I think they’ve smashed the project out of the park.” The super-truck features massive…

Flick through the pages of any issue of NZ4WD and you will find plenty of ads from reputable companies selling suspension upgrade parts and services. Once you start looking the choice is vast – from simple replacement of your OEM struts, coils, leafs and dampers with aftermarket equivalents, to extravagant lift kits which will see your humble daily driver or weekend warrior tower over you like a Transformer. Check through our feature this month and you can read about how much work has to go into developing aftermarket packages which meet all the relevant government standards around the world. Here, what you can and can’t do is set out by the Land Transport Safety Authority (LTSA) with much of the behind-the-scenes work done on its behalf by the Low Volume…

The topic this month is volunteering and where we’re going with that concept. We keep getting told that everyone is now busier than those people from previous decades and that there’s less time to get involved in volunteering to help organise, or take part in community activities. Strangely enough, it is in an age of almost instant communication that many organisations are struggling to get people to take up roles on committees, etc. An age where a meeting can be held ‘online’, without leaving your house and emails can carry words and pictures instantly. With four-wheeling the act of volunteering seems to take two main forms, assisting with running a club and efforts that will earn respect for caring for the environment. With the running of clubs and organisations there…

This year we had the pleasure of taking my five-year-old grand-daughter along with us. She was stoked because she finally got to see Grandpa Scotty in action in his Jeep. Hence me not being able to get around many stages to see all the action. That said, Keone (grand-daughter) and I did get to view a couple of stages and the ones we saw had mud flying. Marlborough 4WD Club was the hosting club with the event held over Queen’s Birthday weekend (31 May – 02 June). Like the rest of the country it’s been a crazy time of year for the weather. Basically right up until the week before the ground was dry, with not a lot of water and driving the stages wasn’t too bad apparently. Mid-week before…

It’s been due for a tidy-up for a fair while. The Class Nine rules have been the topic of this page a number of times, largely for their lack of any real prescription of what a Class Nine is. The sport’s origins deep in the southern reaches of California and the desert states of the USA included both purpose-built race cars or ‘buggies’ and the Baja Bug – a cut-down, tough, nuggety VW Beetle. The air cooled engine, beam front end and swing axle rear were all designed for simplicity and ease of maintenance and repair in the cars’ native Germany during the years between World War One and World War Two. The name Volkswagen means People’s Car. All these attributes made the wee cars ideal off-roaders – first for…

It’s not often one gets to see the results of a fundraising Safari event but that is exactly what I did when I attended a monthly meeting of the Manawatu 4WD Club recently. There I saw for myself the handiwork of the man they call the Leprechaun (also known as Club President Philip Law) who having collected and banked $17,000 from this year’s Ngamatapouri event presented it in large ceremonial cheque form to Nick Laing, CEO of 13-24-yrs cancer help charity CanTeen. A fine conclusion from a great weekend of 4WDing amongst old and new friends, I say!…

NZ Adventures is a long established company offering various off road and back country tours in the South Island. Participants generally bring their own or often hire suitable four-wheel-drive vehicles and are guided by the experienced team of Robbie and Connie Crickett from NZ Adventures across a wide variety of the island’s vast back country over sheep stations, forests and conservation lands. Country high Especially popular amongst the five different tours on offer are the High Country Heritage six or seven-day tour and the five-day Eastern Explorer. The High Country Heritage is a tour down the foothills of the Southern Alps starting in Blenheim and ending in distant Cardrona with overnights in Hanmer Springs, Methven, Fairlie, Omarama and Cromwell along the way. On the seven-day March trip the additional overnight…

New trailer socket w/ battery connector Automotive lighting and electrical company Narva has released a new seven-pin flat trailer socket with a built-in heavy-duty battery connector. Developed with camping, caravanning or boating enthusiasts in mind, the product is ideal for people who regularly tow vehicles requiring battery maintenance to the trailer or caravan, to power on-board equipment. The seven-pin trailer plug delivers power to operate the standard stop, tail, reverse and licence plate lights, while also providing a built-in, heavy-duty battery connector that delivers up to 50A of power to the battery to charge, maintain or power equipment such as fridges. More information is available on the www.narva.co.nz website. Safer lithium iron phosphate battery charging A new 12V, 1A Automatic IC100L model lithium battery charger has joined Projecta’s ‘Intelli-Charge’ range…

One of the things that has amazed me about the South Island of New Zealand is the size and friendliness of the Overlanding community here. Within weeks of taking the ferry to Picton, I was in contact with a whole community eager to show a “Jafa” what the Mainland was all about. I have been visiting the South Island for years, but still the opportunity to meet up with like-minded people was overwhelming; case in point one final ‘end-ofsummer’ trip into the Oteake Conservation Park with a bunch of new-found friends. For those of you who have not been, the Oteake area (nestled between the Maniototo Plain and the Mackenzie Country-Ed) is one of the very best 4WD playgrounds in New Zealand. The tracks are diverse with river crossings, open…

Foam cell shock absorbers help to reduce shock fade by keeping nitrogen gas and oil found inside the shock separated, but how are they made? We spoke with the guys from Tough Dog suspension to see exactly what goes into the making of their award-winning 41mm Foam Cell shock absorbers. Step by Step  1: The outer body is made from sheet steel which is rolled then seam welded to size. Rolling tube and seam welding is a traditional way of cost effectively making tube. Tough Dog Shocks are a twin tube design, meaning that the outer body tube contains oil, but is not part of the piston’s working surface. If the application demands it, the ends of the newly formed tube are swaged down to size. 2: While the shock…

With over 50 years’ experience in building suspension components, Ironman 4x4 have earned the title of suspension specialists and are well qualified to explain just how shocks and springs are made. How are springs are made? After deciding to bring out a replacement kit for a vehicle, the standard suspension is assessed, and then decisions made as to the lift height and shock absorber rates. Whether a coil spring is made progressive or linear depends on what the manufacturer has originally specified for the vehicle. Ironman typically brings out a range of spring rates from A to E, with A being the softest and E for the heaviest loads. Most 4WDers will go for the B and C springs which are designed for a slight lift and a heavier load…

Our monthly feature showcases 4WDs doing just about anything except rolling over or burning! We will award a grand prize of a set of four Kumho 4x4 tyres in the NZ4WD Annual issue. This contest is open to all readers who are not professional photographers. IMPORTANT: Photographs must have been taken by the person entering them, or have the photographer’s written permission. Email your digital images and a detailed caption to: editor@NZ4WD.co.nz Send your prints and detailed captions to: Your4s with Kumho, PO Box 65-092, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 0754. Be sure to include your postal address! Submitting photos The basics: as with any photo, there’s no substitute for an image that’s sharp – in focus and free of camera shake. It should be well-exposed. Size and type The ideal submission…