As a first car, I really did not need speed, so this was an ideal car for me, it took me places that my friends old EH wagon could only dream of. I remember one memorable weekend trip out to the Hervey Ranges near Peak Hill in Central NSW, it was my mates first time out 4WDing with me and we had seen a very rough fire trail descending down the northern side of the main range, of course we had to go see where it went.
At one point, Lance, my mate was outside the passenger door, hanging off the side of the car, I was in the passenger seat driving from there as we were trying to get as much weight as we could on the passenger side to stop us from flipping over whilst we dropped down a rather high rock ledge. Once we passed that and made it off the mountain, poor Lance swore he would never go 4WDing with me ever again. He of course was not going to go back up that hill, and, well, neither was I, so we had to find an alternative way back to a main road, but, that's another story.
She was a manual 4 speed box, with a proper low range transfer case, running on the old agressive style "butter cutters" or the old army style bar tread tyres. For the price I paid, which was around $2300, it was a bargain, I knew the owner so I had a good idea on how it had been treated.
The LJ-50 was a 3 cylinder 2 stroke car with an engine capacity of around just 539cc developing a whopping 33hp @ 5500rpm. This one was different, it had been bored out and had extractors on it, I have no idea what capacity it was bored out to, but she sure made a unique sound. Usual speed with a tail wind was around 80k's, maybe up to 90 down a hill.
I loved this car, I got a professional carpet layer to line the car with a hard wearing brown carpet, front and rear, holy cow, did he do an amazing job and made it look so easy too. Brown may not have been a fabulous colour choice, but it did actually look pretty darn good inside.
I also added a thin pin stripe around the doors, bonnet and rear windows etc. It was looking pretty good, I'll see if I can't dig an old photo out of the old girl and post it here.
It was time to upgrade to the new model, the Sierra.