Already putting the Defender to work.
Here’s one with about 1,000 lbs of rocks in the back.
Oooof, that must have made it struggle on the hills !!
In around 1970 British Steel Corporation put me on an aeroplane for my first ever flight (Vickers Viscount -- Wick, Inverness, Glasgow, BAC-1/11 to Birmingham) to go to our main garage and collect a new Land-Rover Series Two diesel with 62 bhp (claimed) and drive it back through the Northern England and Scottish Highlands to the very north of Scotland where I was working. To enliven the journey they added 1/2 ton of welding rods to take with me (long, short or metric tons it's a lot of weight). At an overnight stop in Glasgow where all I wanted was for our local depot to put a lot more air into the damned tyres they added another half ton of rods. These were very, very special welding rods of ultra high-temperature CMV steel needed in the construction of an experimental nuclear power station.
From driving that same journey earlier in the year in my own Mini (34 bhp claimed) I knew that the shortest route directly over the mountains was going to be slower than the long route along the coast, which had some lumpy bits but not too excessive. So after two looooong days of driving the Land-Rover, welding rods & I arrived without trouble. Next day, in my normal role of site apprentice (aka gofer) I needed to go into town on some errand, parked and pulled the engine kill knob. Engine kept running -- it was a diesel and in those days they didn't turn off with an electrical switch, there was a valve in the fuel supply operated by a cable from inside the cab. No problem, I knew which lever on the injection pump to pull and that was good enough to then get back to our site at Dounreay where I could get a screwdriver and a pair of pliers to secure the cable properly.
That Land-Rover could pull 5 tons (l/s/m...) of steel pipe on a trailer across a construction site -- but it didn't like it, not one little bit. (Another part of my job was finding things in our dump, summoning a crane driver and then getting 5 tones of fabricated CMV steel into the building.) My assigned time there was finished a couple of months later and I went back to college, but I was told eventually that the Land-Rover had lasted six months of that sort of work before being worn out and scrapped. Bit sad reaiiy.
