Essential Upgrades and Spare Parts to Bring in Your 4WD Before Hitting Places Like Cape York.

Just recently the Outback Equipment Ranger went up North to Cape York and before we left we made sure to bring a few things with us before heading off. All too often cars or older 4WDs get stuck in the middle of nowhere as parts tend to rattle apart or get filled with water. As you might know Cape York is a challenging road trip and there are many water crossings, dangerous ruts, corrugated roads and dodgy petrol stations along the way. We’d like to take this opportunity to run through some of the gear we bolted on before it left, including pre filter kits, spare parts and snorkel filters.

Starting with an absolute must have for your vehicle, is a Sakura Filter Kit. Just about all these kits consist of vehicle specific air filters, oil filters and fuel filters with all of them being high quality, and pretty much OEM standard or even better. These 4WD filter kits are crucial for keeping your car’s engine running smoothly, so anything that clogs them up like sand or dust can cause your engine to work harder than it needs to. 4WD maintenance around these trips is crucial. You should definitely check your filters before you go on your trip, if you’re going away for a long period of time, don’t forget to have a look during and after your trip too, as water crossings and dusty roads can also clog up your filters, so we’d recommend having a spare kit just in case.

Next up, if you’re going to remote areas and you want to make sure you have all bases covered, you should probably look into the Drivetech Emergency Hose and Belt Kits. Every kit contains radiator hoses, V-Belts and hose clamps basically everything you need to make sure that a busted radiator hose or power steering belt doesn’t spell the end of your trip, it’s just a nice bit of cheap insurance to have with you. Just like the 4WD air filter kits, it’s always a good idea to have spares and backups, so you might even want to swap out all your belts and hoses before you go on the trip and then keep your old ones as spares in case of an unexpected breakdown.

Moving on we all know how great snorkels are for getting more air into the engine, but what you might not think about is how many other contaminants are getting into your air filter as well. That’s where a snorkel sock from Unifilter comes in handy. These help to prevent larger contaminants as-well as excessive sand and dust from progressing into your filter and impacting the vehicles performance. Snorkel socks are great cheap avoiding this and they come pre oiled out of the bag to increase the effectiveness of the foam filter.

Another essential piece of kit that’s become common in the 4 wheel driving community are pre-filters and oil separators, and for good reason too, as there’s a lot of benefits that come with installing them. Pre-filters pretty much act as the first line of defence for your engines fuel system. Direction Plus makes plenty of these pre-filters, but the two options we recommend are the Fuel manager pre-filter and pre-line Plus Pre-filter. Both offer protection from large contaminants with the fuel manager offering 95% water separation while the pre-line plus offers 100% water separation with the added feature of a multi-stage alert system, alerting you when water is detected in your filter. These Pre-filters are particularly important when travelling remote areas or flood affected areas as contaminated fuel can have water in it. As many of us know water in fuel spells game over for any 4wd engine.

Moving onto the Pro-vent Oil separators (catch cans), these are designed for your modern diesels engines to reduce the amount of oil and soot re-entering your clean air intake. These Oil Separators do a number of things, but the most important issue it tackles is the excessive amounts of oil and soot recirculating through your engine and components. This can cause added strain to the turbo and build up on your intercooler, reducing its effectiveness and life expectancy.

Apart from being able to separate 98% of oil that has recirculated, these are simply worth it for the fact that it'll reduce your smoke and fumes, so you don’t have Karen's eyeballing you at the lights – for all the patrol owners out there. Keep in mind when choosing your oil separators and pre-filters it's important to have good quality products otherwise you might cause more damage than you're preventing. The Direction Plus range provides these high quality catch cans are a great investment for keeping your engine running smoothly.

Another great bit of kit is the Steinbauer Power Module, a module that essentially remaps your engine providing up to 20% more power and torque. Not only does it automatically kick in when you are towing a huge load like a camper trailer up a hill, but the modules have been proven to improve engine performance, lowers revs and elongates the life of your engine. Engine modules like this are a god sent when tackling places like Cape York, as it will automatically kick in when you need it to on tough tracks.