BLOG 4: 74 Series Restoration - Research

Since starting our project on the Land cruiser, we've had to do a bit of research on the car throughout the process of doing it up and seeing what route we wanted to take with the looks and setup of the car. 

Although still part of the 70 series, the 74 series land cruiser only has the different feature of a removable top. Ours however has been siliconed on and with the weather being unpredictable here in New Zealand, we thought this may be a sign that it would leak if we were to ever remove it. So we are definitely leaving it stuck down.

Most old 74 series you can instinctively see the removable top as they are painted a different colour to the body, like ours. However you can hide that feature by simply painting the top and the body the same colour, which was definitely an option we thought of doing.  

The 70 series land cruisers were made since 1984 and took over from the 40/45 series. It became a car that had the perfect combination of features from the 40/45 series and a new updated version which became this car. 

What used to be a normal everyday working car, perfect off road vehicle and very common, has now come back and the Landcruiser community is only growing as these cars are now becoming a very popular car to do up. The newer land cruisers are definitely more expensive straight out the factory and recent, but the older ones are also fairly pricey even for a non done up, hardly working one! 

People have been investing a lot of time and money into these older land cruisers for 4wd and doing them up for camping missions, and its definitely making an impact on the off-road community as well. With Toyota being such a reliable car brand, these Landcruisers are doing upwards of 300,000km and still going strong! And even with that many ks on them, the prices of a non working one are steady and similar!

Just know if you are planning on buying yourself an old Land Cruiser of any kind, the maintenance and upkeep can be a little pricey as like every other 4WD, and also everyone is on the scout for one since the community has gotten so much bigger. However you can easily score yourself one that has no problems! Unfortunately we weren't that lucky!

So after looking at many pictures of 70 and 74 series Land Cruisers, we came across the images of the one below. We thought the white details were a nice touch to the car, and also since it was owned by a girl we thought it added a bit of femininity to the vehicle. We thought about spraying the whole car white, but the body paint is actually in very good shape and the time and money to respray the whole car didn't seem much of a good option with all of the other things we had to fix and replace with the vehicle anyways. Since this car was also the closest colour range to our one and with the added white touch, we thought we would base our project on this Cruiser and its colour way!