It all started back in 1992… I had been driving my Land Cruiser 40 series daily for 15 years but sadly it was starting to look pretty rough. Mechanically the truck was still sound, but the body was growing increasingly cancerous and it was clearly getting beyond restoration. Over the years I had done the traditional rust repairs in steel but it seemed all the hard work only lasted a few months before the rust resurfaced somewhere else. No matter how hard I tried, even full panel replacement in stainless steel didn’t work as eventually the remaining steel mounts gave up and the whole tub simply collapsed onto the frame. I needed a new body and one that would not corrode. Aluminum wasn’t the answer. It couldn’t be used with dissimilar metals unless you wanted to create a battery and it was extremely difficult to repair and even more difficult to work which precluded all the details like the louvers.
What I needed and really wanted was a well built composite body… so I set to work to create my own custom composite tub. The hard part would be creating the tooling that would produce the parts with all the detail of the original truck. The strength and/or the weight or the parts would not be an issue, it was creating all those factory returns and all those details, such as the louvers, that made that made that Land Cruiser “look” that was so important.
After 25 years, the parts and the processes have evolved but oddly we find that today we are back to building the parts more by hand than ever… fitting and assembling individual panels in much the same way the original truck was built. And while this all started for my own personal needs, the product line has expanded to include almost every part to built an entirely composite truck.
Our finished product is almost indistinguishable from the real thing – except it is quieter, stronger and it will never corrode.