As most readers know I own 1998 Prado 3.4 V6 manual 4WD. I have had this vehicle from new and meticulously looked after it, having services every 5,000km.

Just over 12 months ago I did a 7,500km outback trip in 14 days. A lot of remote areas around Central Australia. Probably the worst bit of road we traveled on was the Donahue/Plenty Highway across to Alice Springs.

From memory this was around 800km of shockingly corrugated dirt road. It is as wide as a four lane highway and I tried everything to find the best speed. In the end there wasn’t really any difference, so I sat on 110km/hr and zig-zagged across the road looking for the smoothest sections (not that I found any).

Anyway I believe this relentless thumping caused a couple of problems with my vehicle. On returning home, I found my front springs had sagged a further 10mm, no problems, I just put a couple of 10mm spacers in and problem fixed and the springs haven’t sagged a mm since then.

The second problem started off fairly mildly at first, a slight rear drive line clunk when taking off from a standstill. Now over the 12 months, this hsa slowly got worse. The other day I got under the vehicle again to try and find out what it could be.

I knew it couldn’t be the diff as I had already had a new pinion bearing and crush tube mod put into it (I believe the corrugations took their toll on the pinion bearing) and have also had the Toyota axle recall done. One closer examination I found slight wear in the splined slip joint on the rear of the tail shaft.

I hope to have this repaired in the next week or so, but if like me you have a rear drive line clunk, check out the slip joint for any wear.

Tip:

4x4 Engine Revs<br> Too many revs in tricky situations will have your wheels spinning. Spinning wheels have no grip, so as soon as you feel the wheels spin, lower your revs a little so the tyres can regain grip.