Seemingly unique 4wd issue

Most of the section will be useless for what you need. I was hoping that the diagnostic portion might allow you to get an answer focusing on what the candidate components are.

The fuse box is the one under the dash on the drivers side. You can see fuse 88 on the attached document. Hopefully you will be lucky and that is the problem.

I've now checked the fuses and they all seem to be intact. So I guess there's not much else that can be done really unless anybody has any ideas. I'll let you all know how it goes and hopefully spare somebody in the future from this headache. Thanks for all the help so far though guys, very much appreciated.

I had something very similar which took me days to sort out and it turned out to be one of the vacuum hubs was sticking which you can tell by engaging the 4x drive and then checking by taking off the hub to see which one has engaged.
Also there are 2 solenoid switches on the transfer box which is like a bolt head with a small blue plastic cover. Check the state of the wires into the “bolt head”. But remember if you take them off there is a ball baring inside so be careful not to loose it.
bryn

Hi Bryn,

Sorry, I didn't see that you had replied. Thanks for the advice, but It turns out that the problem was nothing to do with the hubs. With my field work suffering, as I couldn't fix the problem myself, I bit the bullet and took the car to a specialist in the capital city. Only a few hours drive for me, so not too bad.

For anybody else that seems to have a similar problem: in this case the culprit was the motor within the transfer case. There was something wrong with that that meant the front drive shaft was never being engaged, thus the system never even got to the engaging the hubs stage before it cancelled the process. The key to diagnosing this was the blinking light on the dash, so check out some of the detailed guides on here as they describe the process pretty clearly. Thanks to everyone who offered their help. It is greatly appreciated and now I can get back to getting muddy in the jungle.

Oh and by the way the whole thing was only $100 to fix, and this included sorting out the horrible creaking noise that was related to a massive amount of free-play in the rear drive shaft too.

Thanks for everything.

J