little jimny's little jimny!

A couple of weeks ago I put the wee Jimny in for its first MOT in my ownership and...

...it passed!!!!

So I decided to treat it. The Jimnys main duty is being transport for my two greyounds. In the sun the interior gets very, very hot - so hot I could barely touch the headrests to take them out for putting the seats down. I have therefore had the windows tinted This should keep the car cooler, and make it look cooler :laugh:

Here's some pics;



The back three windows and the sunstrip are in dark smoke, the fronts are light smoke.

Did you do the tints yourself or get someone to do them?
I bought tint film a while ago and tried to fit it last Saturday, unfortunately it went a bit like this,

The film ended up in a crumpled ball on the driveway!! Has anyone had any success with DIY tint film?
Cheers,
John.

I got them done professionally. The guy that did them took the back window out and the front windows out to get the best possible finish. He took a morning to do them, and charged £150 which I thought was pretty good value. There was no way I was going to take windows out, and I've seen some horrific home tints on the roads - more air bubbles than an aero :laugh:

Over the last couple of weeks I've done some little mods to the Little Jimny.

First off, I've removed the back seats and seat belts to make a bit more room for dog duties (we now have three retired greyhounds to fit in the back). Next job was to replace the standard crappy rubber steering wheel with a lovely leather one, courtesy of eBay. It came with matching airbag, but the plug on it was different to the existing one, so I kept the original one - didn't feel brave enough to start messing about the wiring and plugs on the airbags.


After that I found a pair of foglamps on eBay going cheap. I've never really liked cars with obvious foglamp blanks so this was the ideal opportunity to do something about it. The bumper came off easily enough and then I set about it with a jigsaw to make the holes, followed by a dremmel to tidy them up. One bolted in no bother, but the other had a bent bracket so I had to straighten that out before the bolt holes lined up. Wiring it up was straight forward. I'd read that the lights on teh Jimny were negatively switched so I just took a feed from teh stereo wiring light pin to keep things nice and simple. The front fogs work on their own seperate switch and will come on if the sidelights are on.



While the stereo was out I decided to upgrade it. The car came with a Sony stereo that I've been wanting to replace for a number of reasons; the lighting doesn't match the dash, the volume control is by fiddly buttons, the CD skips when the bouncy bouncy Jimny hits any road imperfections and finally it bugged the hell out of me by beep beep beeping every time I switched the ignition off (a security feature to remind folk to take the faceplate off). Looking at the centre console I figured that a nice funky double din unit would fit, so I went for a Kenwood DPX404U because it was cheap, looks nice, has a front USB socket, a nice big rotary volume knob and the lighting can be changed to match the dash. The only problem was that whilst the dash hole is big enough for the double din unit, the surrounds are too small to take either the cage or the trim piece :ohmy: I got round this by modifying the stereo/clock holder thing and bolting the stereo to it, and then screwing the whole assembly back into the dash.


Comments welcome

Really like the double din stereo, looks like a good fit.

Same here really like the double din. Sometimes its the simpler mods that can be most rewarding.