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.