Upper Middle Petrol Head:

Yes.  I agree.  We are getting a little ahead of ourselves; installing accessories does, more often than not, come towards the completion end of a project.  However, I'd generously been given a set of vintage Cibie 91I driving lights - last fitted to mate Mark Drury's long-gone '70s Mitsubishi Lancer hatchback - and was looking for an excuse to muck about with P3P. Luckily, thirty five-plus years in a box had been kind to the lights, which came with clear, chip-free lenses, almost completely unblemished reflectors, perfect plastic cases and two pristine black covers with Cibie logos printed in a chrome finish.  I guess this shouldn't be a surprise, though; Mark's training as an architect clearly informs his almost archival approach to storage.  FIRST THINGS FIRST: GETTING THE LIGHTS WORKING ... The thing is, one of the lights didn't work and a faulty bulb wasn't to blame.  Closer inspection revealed that organised and dry as Mark's cache may have been,...

  Upper Middle Petrol Head is primarily a sports, performance and classic car 'blog, so why is it that so many Land Cruisers grace its pages?   The answer is, more often than not, because the Land Cruiser du jour is an early model, resto-modded to within an inch of its life but still maintaining its no-nonsense Land Cruiserishness.  However, today's example - a quite upmarket petrol-powered, 4.5 litre twin-cam VX version, captured in Caringbah, NSW - has been included for its showroom presentation in the face of 26 to 33 years of existence. There is a possibility that it's a grey market import, as it features single one-piece headlight lenses whereas, to the best of Team UMPH's knowledge, Aussie examples had two single units per side. Did you enjoy this post?  Are you a bit of a Cruiser fan?  If so, why not check out the rest of the fairly extensive showing of Toyota's big 4WDs via the search facility on the top right-hand corner of the UMPH homepage? U M ...

This very, very sexy "pony car" is an  American Motors Corporation (AMC) Javelin, possibly a 1968 or '69 model.  For some reason, they were marketed as Rambler Javelins in Australia.  I've not seen it around Hobart before but, with a J -prefix rego, it's not super-new to the state.   It really did look the goods, with very nice duco in a striking shade of blue, straight, shiny chrome and tasty after-market  alloys.  The interior was in similarly great nick.    According to Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMC_Javelin ) , the Javelin came with anything from a 3.8 litre straight six (shared with the Rambler Hornet), through to a stonking 6.4 litre V8.  They weren't considered to be a "big" car, though, being towards the smaller end of the US market, competing with GM's Camaro   / Firebird   lineup rather than, say, Ford's Mustang, GM's GTO or Chrysler's Dodge Charger.   I'm a big fan of the Ramb...

Back in the early 1980s, vehicles like this HJ Sandman were commonplace in the car park that used to run the full length of Sandy Bay's Nutgrove Beach, creating a through-road where there's now a wide pedestrian promenade.  This caused considerable annoyance to gentlefolk of the area and was a constant PiTA for the police tasked with responding to never ending complaints of hooning, drinking, swearing and other behaviour not quite in keeping with the post code!   Forty years down the track, it's hard to fathom that a Sandman - or any classic Aussie car, for that matter - is pulling the same sort of money now as a house did then.  Not a house on the Sandy Bay waterfront, though; you could buy an entire 1980s Eastern Shore street for the price of a 2023 des res anywhere along the Long Beach / Nutgrove strip! All of this makes the location of Hobart's Classics by the Beach, held on the  first Sunday of every month   at the remaining souther...