Junkyard Find: 1974 Toyota Land Cruiser
The Toyota Land Cruiser has been around since the Sengoku Period (OK, since 1951), and all varieties of this truck tend to have plenty of obsessively devoted single-interest fanatics here in Colorado. You’ll see the occasional FJ60 Land Cruiser in junkyards here, and I’ve even seen a well-stripped FJ40 in a Denver yard. Today’s well-thrashed Junkyard Find is the first example of an FJ55 Land Cruiser I’ve found.
Is there rust? Yes, there is rust. Is there body filler over rust? Definitely.
Look, air conditioning! This would have been fairly luxurious by 1974 truck standards.
Front drum brakes could still be found on a few Detroit cars, and the Land Cruiser, in 1974.
Toyota did a lot of license-building of GM technology in the postwar era; the GM-developed PowerGlide was the basis of the Toyoglide automatic transmission, and the F engine used in this truck was a cousin of the good old Chevrolet straight-six OHV engine.
It was rough when it showed up in this yard, and many parts-hungry Land Cruiser owners have picked it over since then.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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It's no wonder used ones demand such a high premium.
A buddy of mine with a lawn service in Colorado had one of these. The above model is in better shape than the one he would tow trailers with. Since he didn't live where his customers were he would park his beast in their neighborhoods overnight and commute home in something that was a little better on fuel. One Sunday morning the Boulder County Sheriff's office called him about the truck. He was "invited" to come and discuss it in person. When he arrived the Bomb Squad was there along with 10 or 15 other law enforcement vehicles. It seems he parked his old Toyota with external trailer light, chassis brake light, and maybe even fuel pump wires, a sheet of plexi for a back window, and non-working door handles and missing window cranks in front of Federal Judge Richard Matsch's house during the Timothy McVeigh trial. All's well that ended well, especially since the LEOs didn't question the three 50lb bags of fertilizer in the back.