LOW RIDER

GOT HEIGHT RESTRICTIONS WHEN IT COMES TO PARKING YOUR FOURBY? TRED OUTDOORS HAS COME UP WITH A SOLUTION.

- GLENN MARSHALL

PARKING my Prado under the carport is a real challenge, even after chopping the front fascia out with a grinder and reciprocal saw. One side of the carport was still lower than the other, and my wife wasn’t happy about me parking in the middle of the carport, leaving her to park her car out in the weather.

With a 50mm suspension lift and a rooftop tent mounted to load bars on a Tracklander backbone, the Prado is a smidge under 2.2m tall. Then I mounted some load bars to the lid of the tent, installed a TRED mounting baseplate and 115mm threaded mounting pins to carry four TRED Pro recovery boards, and overall height grew to 2.3m.

This was a nightmare when it came to accessing underground carparks or negotiating fast-food drive-throughs, let alone squeezing under the carport. I once tried to enter an underground carpark with a clearance of 2.3m but ended up destroying two of the plastic TRED securing nuts, as they sat just 2mm above the top of the threaded mounting pin. Thankfully the pins weren’t damaged.