Louise Limb – contributor

Don’t you think you ought to put it in four-wheel drive’ my husband suggested weakly, as we slewed around the moor top road in the gloom, an early fall of snow having settled upon earlier slush, the two layers of road gunge freezing fast as I picked my way along. ‘I am in four-wheel drive’, I snapped back, hoping quietly we’d make it gently through the downward sloping junction without hitting anyone. I’d forgotten about those pesky back tyres and the snow had caught me out.

Bob Cooke – contributor

Some sausages on a makeshift barbecue, a Kelly kettle and a Jeep. What more could anyone ask for? I’d had enough of beavering away in a stuffy office. It was wintry cold outside, and it looked as if it might be working up into a gale, but the thought of getting a breath of fresh air easily outweighed the prospect of catching up with a boring backlog of filing. I called Pete and found that he felt the same way, so pausing only to purchase a pack of Toulouse sausages from our local superstore, I aimed the Cherokee towards Buckinghamshire, the cruise control coming into its own on the long haul round the M25. I mention that because the cruise control still works, even if the air conditioning doesn’t, which is a pity – even in winter – because air con can be an effective means of demisting a clammy vehicle.

The heater fan is still capable of blowing hot air into the cab, so the only really annoying problem left is that the heater controls, along with the stereo and the digital clock, don’t illuminate at night, so I’ve had to learn to operate them Braille-fashion. Perversely, the gearshift indicator beside the gear lever has suddenly decided to illuminate again. Permanently.

Shion Scudamore – contributor

Another year is slipping by and the Bedford is still on the drive. Indeed, it’s been a few months since I have had much to report. Where does all the time go these days? The good news is that the welding on the cab has more or less been finished. However, the race against time to get the paint on the front half of the chassis and the cab is not looking good at the moment.

Once the old girl is roadworthy again, I can get her to a decent venue to complete the spraying but for now I am at the mercy of the Anglesey wind and rain – which is particularly viscious as this is being written – and matched with rapidly dropping temperatures.

Bob Cooke – contributor

We’ve got more than mere mud to worry about these days, what with global warming contrarily giving us shorter summers and chillier winters. Hence the decision to try Goodyear’s new Wrangler Duratrac tyres wasn’t just because the mud at the Slindon Safari site is as thick, gloopy and slithery as any you’ll find anywhere, but because the tread pattern of these new tyres, while optimised for deep mud conditions, is also designed to be particularly effective in snow.

At first glance we couldn’t help wondering whether the seemingly close tread pattern – with more tightly-packed tread blocks that on the good old BFGoodrich Mud Terrains that we’re more used to – would ultimately be as effective in muddy conditions. We very quickly did discover one significant advantage of that tread pattern, however, on the way to the off-road site: the new Wranglers run extremely quietly on the highway, give impressive cornering grip and confident braking performance. With the BFGs we could always tell the speed of the vehicle by the pitch of the hum coming from the tyres (a charming rather than annoying feature) but the Duratracs proved only marginally noisier than the Eagle GA road tyres they’d replaced.

Louise Limb – contributor

Sometimes, even for a creative type, I can be really dopey. A few months back I finally joined the 21st century and got myself a Blackberry – an Apple  iPhone on an 18 month contract seemed a little too expensive for my pocket! Of course, unlike the old Nokia, the battery life between charges is minimal and I found myself buying an in car charger – yes, I know you’ve all had these since dinosaurs walked the earth… and proceeded to try to plug the offending object into both of the 12 volt sockets on my console. The one next to the main gearstick decided to break its plastic housing, detach itself from the console and come out with the charger. Mmm, perhaps not a good idea to use that one.

Hils Everitt – Editor at Large

When our editor borrowed the L200 recently for some local running around, he was more than happy to give it back to me, as the fuel consumption, compared to his partner Sue’s Toyota RAV4, was clearly upsetting him. 

The RAV, as you can see regularly in this section, is being quoted as around 31mpg, whereas the 2.5-litre workhorse that powers our shiny silver Warrior spec has an official figure of 30mpg. Not a lot of difference then, so what’s the problem?
Well, if you look at the onboard computer and flick it over to the average fuel consumption reading (which obviously our Ed did) then I certainly, rarely get anything above 26.5mpg. I decided to put it to the test and see how high I could actually get the red numbers to go.

Nigel Fryatt – editor

Buying yourself a 4×4 is a great experience – if not without some concerns. If it’s a ‘previously owned’ model, it all depends on the owner; is he really being honest when he talks about “only done a bit of off-roading”. Or when he explains all the details about the servicing, can he look you in the eye and say, “oh, yes, it’s never let me down. Very reliable.” You have to make sure you don’t have your beer goggles on when making that decision. Mind you, that’s even more difficult if you have already decided that you ‘need a new 4×4’. What a great excuse that is, to actually ‘need’ one! Is it a bloke thing, to ‘need’ a 4×4? Or maybe it’s an enthusiast’s need, not just restricted to blokes.

Hils Everitt – Editor at Large

It’s been a while since my beloved silver machine has graced the pages of the mag as I’ve not really done an awful lot with it, apart from a few pleasure trips, one up to the Norfolk Broads and the odd kit-lugging exercise to rugby matches.

So, all’s well in the Grand world, finally, after an annus horribilis in 2010. Well, that was until someone, who shall remain nameless, decided to do something totally idiotic and halt the poor Jeep, yet again, in its tracks. No, that doesn’t mean some stupid off-roading debacle, merely a complete lapse of brain activity which could have killed-off my beloved steed completely.

Okay, so after a superb trip to the Swiss Alps for some R ‘n’ R, the Grand was picked up from the valet parking at Gatwick and it was off to the shops to stock up the fridge and cupboard and get milk for that long-awaited decent English cuppa.

Bob Cooke – contributor

There’s definitely something fishy about my “new” Cherokee. Don’t think I’m complaining, if I’ve gone and bought a dud car for too much money it’s entirely my own fault; I’ve bought dozens of old cars in my time and very few have been bad ones, thanks to the set of rules I’ve drawn up, which include: Never buy from a dealer (I’ve never had a warranty on a used car that was worth the paper it was written on), never buy from a friend (too many of my ex-friends have a significantly different idea of what constitutes a sound and reliable car than I have), and never buy from a farmer (too much mud, chemical fertiliser and chicken droppings, let alone a tendency to skip  servicing).

So I bought this car from a farmer on the advice of a friend, and I deserve everything I’ve got. The appeal was that the car had only done 60,000 miles from new; the car had been bought new but was only driven regularly for a few years.

Louise Limb – contributor

It’s fair to say that more than just a spot of water has been falling out of the sky around these parts of late. Having quietly ignored my front brake pads while they continued to behave perfectly well for several months despite Phil’s dire warnings about the reluctance of the nearside wheel to spin freely while it was up on the hoist, I had a wee bit of a scare on a sneaky bend in torrential rain recently.

Negotiating a series of roundabouts while escaping the clutches of central Bradford, I very nearly swapped lanes rather more suddenly than I would normally prefer. I was accelerating gently up the middle lane out of an uphill lefthander, between lorries and cars on a very wet road, when I started to pirouette to the left! Nice if you’re a ballet dancer, but not so good surrounded by a ton of metal, which, given half a chance will overturn if you do anything unexpected.