Apparently, according to the wife, I was taking the Magna places no Magna should be taken, I read the owners manual, it never mentioned not taking the magna offroad. She said we needed to get a 4WD again, you could have knocked me over with a feather! So, I did some research, kicked a lot of tyres, did some test drives and we decided that a Pajero was for us. Took a test drive of a 3ltr model and it was simply horrible, no power, gutless. It had to be a 3.5ltr version. Some more car yard hoping, a test drive or two and I found a 99 NL 3.5ltr in very good condition, but a bit pricey.
The wife came and had a drive and we decided to buy it, wow, it was very cool and still is, we christened it "Larry". It has now traveled 150,000+km's with us, a lot of that offroad or touring with our camper trailer or more recently just a swag or tent and apart from some minor issues, it has been pretty reliable.
So I had seen the great fridge slide and drawer setup at many 4WD shows and they were just out of our budget, so, I ordered a bullet-proof fridge slide and built the fridge enclosure and base myself. problem solved, the fridge no longer overheated. Plus, it looks really cool in the back. At the end of 2011, we decided that we had to upgrade the fridge and changed to a 2 way fridge with a compressor, but it was bigger, so, I had to chop the fridge box off, make it taller and re-carpet it hoping to blend it all so it did not look like it had been modified, plus, it still had to have good strength. It came out quite good.
The new fridge required a battery of it's own, so we also had a 2nd deep cycle battery fitted, a dual battery controller and I fitted a pure sine wave inverter at the same time.
Larry has since been modified inside and out as our needs changed over the years, the rear area was better setup for food boxes and the other camping gear, a lift kit was put in, long range tank, UHF radio, LED light bar, roof racks to mount the side awning, anything we felt we needed to change after a big trip, we wrote a list out and now, we pretty much have him setup just the way we want.
Larry died, well, the engine did, the noise that came out of the engine bay was just scary, some serious metal clanging. We had him towed from home and the engine was rebuilt, just like new. He ran better, used no oil, had better economy and was better to drive and tour with. In 2019, he turned 20 years old and is still just going and going!
Update: As of Friday 17th Jan, 2020, Larry is now under a defect notice for the Takata driver side airbag. From what we can gather, there is no replacement, so Mitsubishi are making offers to purchase the vehicles affected. Pretty gutted really. He goes into Mitsubishi shortly and after that, we are made an offer to buy him from us.
Larry is gone, long may the memories of Larry remain!
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