Joel's 1972 Land Cruiser Project

[wickedrx7]

Wow! first off, I commend you in your commitment to move everything and go full “in”.  The 52,000 lb container is something else…..  What other vehicles did you bring?

I love the big island; I have family from Kona and still know a couple people there.  Friends of family and my wife has a friend that lives on the Hilo side.   I do know a guy who has property in Waipio valley, next time I am out that way I will hit you up and maybe we can coordinate a little off-road adventure with them.  Have fun exploring the other islands too, they are much different from what I have heard.  Oh, and do the night dive with manta rays… touristy but amazing.  I have a dive shop I can recommend for this if interested.
If you like fresh fish (I hope you do as you live on an island), check out the Suisan Fish Market in Hilo, amazing fish and Poke, get there early or it will be picked over. 
Have you guys adapted to island life/time yet?

[frijolee]

Thanks Wicked, we kinda burned the ships and came to come.  One of the last things to go in was my lawn mower.  Just ran out of time to sell it and figured it might be useful someday.  We purged so much! But if there was a debate to keep or toss, we erred on the side of bringing it. 

Vehicles: 72 FJ40 (in container), 90 Mazda Rx7, 99 Jeep Cherokee, '12 Mazda5 (family hauler and only van sold in the US with a stick shift).  We did leave the Ronin development mule Rx8 back in Cali at a friend's shop.  Working to get some things on that scanned then it'll be sold.

I'm always down for recommendations.  Could you ping me with a few referrals on PM?  Haven't tried the manta ray dive but I've heard others mention it.

Re: Island time...  I tend to think a slightly slower pace of life is healthy for me.  Running Ronin on the side of a day job isn't exactly the most stress free hobby.  That said, Mike and I have evolved this business a few times and it looks like we will be successful again.

[frijolee]

Moving in from the container 2 weeks later was the reverse of out with the exception that you have to pay for all profession labor since you only know one guy on the island.  Conen’s Freight Transport does have a bad ass device that’s actually made for setting containers on ground (Hamer Lift).




Big ass compressor goes in the closet under the stairs.




Metal to the backyard to be tarped for later.




After all that our only casualty was a busted TV.  It may have even been cracked during packing rather than transit.  Oh yeah, we caught it just in time for Black Friday. 




It probably helped that every last dresser got wrapped in cardboard and saran wrap to keep things from chaffing against each other.  My buddy Ander built me something like 7 wood crates for saws and heavy tools.  I also used a metric ton of plastic banding wrap.  This stuff is SOOO good!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004OR1CR0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It turns out Hawaiian sunsets are pretty good too.



So that’s how you move to Hawaii…  By the way, apparently I set some sort of all-time record for Keck regarding heaviest container.  Conen Freight Transport (who did the unload) said it was the densest packed container they’d ever seen!

Aloha from the Paynes!




Our three running vehicles all shipped loose via barge.  It costs about $1100 per vehicle to ship one out of Long Beach.  Not too bad and since cars are more expense here, we brought them all.

And… here we are in the new digs.  Time to get back to work.

[freeskier7791]

Seriously cool, how do the kids like the new school

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

[gc3]

awesome! I just came back from a week on the big island, the rainforest was REALLY humid but the desert side was bearable in 90+ temps.
judging by the % of lifted toyotas i saw I have a feeling the FJ will fit right in!

got a really nice double rainbow in Waimanu Valley, right outside the tent. I recommend the hike maybe when your kids are a little bigger.

[frijolee]

GC3, solid work...  We haven't made it to Waimanu Valley.  That's supposed to be a serious hike!  16 miles and 7000' elevation change if memory serves.  Where did you stash your car?

[gc3]

GC3, solid work...  We haven't made it to Waimanu Valley.  That's supposed to be a serious hike!  16 miles and 7000' elevation change if memory serves.  Where did you stash your car?

yea my legs were rubber for a couple days afterwards.
we were going to part it at the art gallery but was able to find a way to get dropped off and picked up at the waipio lookout.
we ended up hitchhiking up waipio road on the way out but walked our way down at the beginning (full pack weight!). I don't recommend, worth waiting to hitch a ride down too.

from the people we talked to seems most people were chancing parking at the lookout, and found 1 group who just parked on the beach. Don't know if their rental jeep was still there when they got back or not.

[shainiac]

I drove down and back up the Waipio Valley Rd in our rental Jeep. It was way more treacherous than I would have guessed. And the valley road is pretty serious too. There are a couple river crossings and mostly rutted out dirt roads. I can’t imagine hiking that!

[freeskier7791]

Joel you need to get the FJ finished so you can do some wheeling out there!

[frijolee]

I'll get back to posting on the FJ soon, I promise.  I think I'm going to start scattering a few pics of Jeep adventures in here just to keep things interesting since progress is slow (I'm working hard on some Ronin stuff in the evenings too).

Anways here's a little flavor of Hawaiian wheeling.  I've hooked up with the Big Island Jeep Club and started running with them.  Solid folks and seems like a good place for me relative to the crazy/controlled spectrum of 4x4'ers.

This run was up on Mana Rd which wraps around Mauna Kea (mountain with telescopes) on the green side.  I headed up putting kids to bed Friday night for a weekend of camping at Ranger station bunk house. Drove up in the dark which was a little sketch conisdering it was first time I'd been on this road (but man what a road!).  At one point I came ripping around a corner and suddenly I was in an open field full of a couple hundred cows.




Only minor issue was a loose radiator cap on arrival (that's what I get for topping of fluids in the dark right before I left).  Thankfully I got spotted a gallon on arrival and I was good to go.

Night wheeling was rad. 










Next morning and yep, I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact I'm going to have mud in places I'll never get out.  At least not without hours and hours of detailing.  I'm calling it a Hawaiian rig and moving on...




Good group albeit I was the only XJ representing.  Apparently there's one more in the club but I haven't meet them yet.




I did manage to rip off my cool muffler bearing though.  Working theory is that I lost the bolt then the exhaust bounced hard enough to snap the mount.  Bailing wire for the win.




I can't even get over how rad the terrain is around here.  The hill climb we were queue up for was rad (if quite the slip 'n slide)




By the end of day two, you couldn't tell what color my rig is.




The stoke is real.
-Joel

[frijolee]

Few more pics...

Another shot of that slip 'n slide...




If your underside got too dirty, you could always go rinse off.




A few folks decided to drive the remainder of Mana Rd (~40 miles) to try to catch the sunset from the Mauna Kea summit.  I warned folks the rangers might not let us up with muddy vehicles but apparently we'd rattled enough off on the way over (it transitions back to dry side in route) that they let us up.

View from the top was good but kinda cloudy.




Then suddenly the sun breaks through and the world turned insanely red.  Like "Eye of Mordor" the world is one fire red... 




Camera couldn't keep up with the color above, but this pic might give you a better idea.








So neat!  Back at camp, much fireball was drunk, much meat was BBQ'ed.  Let me tell you that a big Hawaiian man playing Adele's "Someone Like You" on a ukulele while folks sing along at the top of their lungs in the middle of nowhere?  Yeah, good times indeed.

Maybe you had to be there but it was fun, I promise.




I'll close this round with a few shots of the main Mana Rd from the way back into town.






This island is rad.
-Joel

[wickedrx7]

That looks amazing.

[digitalsolo]

Wow, that’s gorgeous!

[frijolee]

Arriving home from Mana Rd, I found I apparently wheeled hard enough to jam some wood in between a couple of my tire beads.  I only dropped down to 18 psi or so, but there's a lot of throttle involved when you go wheeling deep in the woods.  ;-)





Thought I got it all but actually managed to give myself a leak so I got to pull the tire and clean more thoroughly.




I also had a heck of filthy rig that I didn't want to just take a wash cloth to and scratch the hell out of everything so I also started researching pressure washers (duh!).  Once upon a time a harbor freight "1400 psi" unit that died, but having been spoiled by a friend's big gas powered Dewalt while in SoCal I wanted something better--while staying electric for size and simplicity.  Turns out there are metric ton of options, half of them look identical but perform differently, how you set them up matters (IE nozzle flow sizes), and ratings are only marginally meaningful since how manufacturers rate these things varies widely. 

Don't know about you guys but with tools, I'd rather over-research and be sure I'm getting the right thing.

Findings:

If you really want to understand pressure washers the best resource I found was Obsessed Garage.  They tested 50 some units to validate flow and pressure.  You need both criteria to be effective.  Here's the massive playlist.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG_BGdABDC9s97iOZTLJVO3TF-K3fx99g

Obsessed Garage then sells upgrades for every common type of pressure washer to get max effectiveness out of any given unit.
https://www.obsessedgarage.com/collections/pressure-washing

Brass tacks... I ordered the Greenworks 2000 psi variation sold via Lowes. 
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Greenworks-2000-PSI-1-2-GPM-Cold-Water-Electric-Pressure-Washer/1000731276





Here's a shortcut to the review of this specific machine.


I like that the unit has a stainless steel wand, a quality hose, uses generic interfaces (as opposed to proprietary versions), and generally punches above it's weight.  I did not want the built in hose real as apparently those all suck.  I did buy bigger 3.0 nozzles per G.O.'s recommendation but skipped the foam cannon and all the other adapter options.

A few other purchase recommendations:

I really dig the option to washer undercarriages so this was a big help and adapts fine to the end of the Greenworks wand.
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07K22DGRY/

Pressure washer specific soap. (Two "loads" per water tank gets a happy level of foamy IMHO)
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BMB48X0/

Pump protector (apparently a typical reason why washers fail)
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CNRSUJK/


So all that said, a week later and I was in business.  It all works.  My girls think it's a big game and are asking to use the thing.






...and here we are back to "boulevard" status for a run to the beach.




Anyways, hope the research helps some other folks.

Cheers y'all,
Joel

[digitalsolo]

THANK YOU!

I need a pressure washer, so I much appreciate you pre-researching it for me.      Obsessed Garage is a great channel, too.