This is why your daughter would be better off with a new Toyota or similar newer truck. You have had several things break that she probably would not be able to fix in the middle of no where.
Even if you don't consider her personal safety, it would be difficult to get this truck fixed in a remote area. Sometimes it's hard to get them fixed at all unless you do it yourself.
...The good news about everything that's failed on the M1010 is that I've been able to fix everything in my driveway, or on the side of the road, with the tools in the truck. The collection of spare parts on the truck has grown and evolved as I've learned...
...When the freeze-out plug failed, I put RTV on a stainless sheet metal screw and drove it into the hole...
...I don't have the sense that a modern truck would be amenable to such temporary work-arounds. When the computer goes, you're dead in the water until you can get a new one. And you need another computer to diagnose problems...
...The thought was to refresh the M1010, get it reliable, and teach her how to maintain it. So far, it's not reliable yet...
I have a comment and a story on this line of thought... vehicles are machines. The world is tough on machines, especially when the world is not human tuned for vehicle survival (i.e. roads). Is your daughter involved in any of the repair work? This stuff is just as important to learn as how to change a tire or oil. Learning how to think outside the box with what tools and supplies you have available is important to getting you home.
I drove a 1993 Toyota pickup for about 20 years. It had an ECU, but it still had fuel, exhaust, oil, moving parts. Things broke on it all the time after it hit 200K on the odometer - one memorable experience was driving up Highway 108 in California towards the California/Nevada border where the
MCMWTC is. There is no cell phone coverage up there, and on a rainy day with no traffic, a little plastic hanger under the truck decided it had enough. The wire harness that it was holding up and away from the exhaust pipe, it happens that this wire harness contained one of the O2 sensor cable bundles and the power wire for the sensor. in short order the hot exhaust pipe melted its way through the sheath, electrical tape, and then wires... eventually the O2 sensor power supply wire jacket melted through to the bare wire and the ECU's + power supply had a direct path to the ground. This blew the ECU's fuse, so no more power to the fuel injectors or trigger pulses to the ignition coil. Engine stopped dead and we (my then girlfriend) coasted to a stop, right outside the Brightman ranger station which was closed at the time for the season.
With no insight other that the Check Engine light not turning on I had to start troubleshooting the truck. There weren't any cars going by, and there were zero bars on the cell phones (and it had been that way for some time). First thing was digging out the fuse box and finding out that the ECU fuse had in fact popped. Next thing was discovering that I did not have a spare 10 amp fuse for the ECU. But the dome light ran on a 10Amp fuse... put that one in the fuse box to see if it was just a nuisance blow, turned the key - nope, fuse popped again. Pulled the ECU out of its cubby and opened the cover - it was now raining very hard outside. Nothing burned or broken so the cover went back on the case and the ECU back in its cubby. Next I had to trace out wires coming from the ECU under the hood - in the rain. Nothing under the hood looked burned, hot, or damaged, but I saw one bundle fan off from the others under the truck. I pulled out a plastic sun visor to use as a drop cloth to keep me out of the large pool of water that was now forming under the truck due to the rain. I started to smell burning plastic once I got under the truck - I followed my nose and the harness until both met at the top of the exhaust pipe.
Once I found the wire harness had melted down to the copper, I needed to think about how to insulate the various wires in the bundle from each other, then I needed to think about how to keep the wire off the exhaust for the rest of the trip back down the hill. I didn't have a roll of electrical tape, zip ties, or any repair parts handy... I did have a car stereo and a first aid kit, and some ear plugs with a keeper between the two plugs. I pulled some of the used electrical tape off the car stereo and used that to insulate the wires from each other. The e-tape didn't have any stickiness to it any more so to keep it in place on the wire harness, I used a band-aid wrapped around the harness. To keep the wire harness off the hot exhaust, I tore off the ear plugs leaving an 18" length of rubberized "string" - which I tied to the remains of the plastic hanger.
I only had two more fuses that were 10Amps, the turn signals and the brake lights. Since I only expected to make one turn off 108 into Longbarn and I figured getting rear-ended was worse than not having turn signals (especially since I can use hand signals). I swapped the turn signal fuse in and tried the key again, success!
Point of this nearly meandering story is that I was in a situation without communication to the outside world, and I was at least two days walk from the closest phone (either hike up to the MCMWTC, or hike down to Strawberry). I didn't have much in the way of supplies, but understood how most of the systems worked, and what wires and circuit boards look like both good and bad - I knew what I could safely cannibalize from other systems on the truck to get the critical motive power.
Here having an analytical mind and knowing enough about the systems to find a problem and fix it in the field is what got me home. It would have been a very long, wet, cold walk.
If only they knew how you were driving that M1010 just a few short weeks ago.
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. Well done.
