Ryan's 2003 Jimny JLX

Hi all,

Thought I'd share my latest toy which I've had for nearly 6 months now.

I'll start with a bit of background. I had initially started looking for a cheap track day toy to have some fun with and to learn basic mechanics on. However since tallying up the costs associated with frequently doing track days not to mention the risk of binning the car and having the dilemma of how to get it home, it quickly put me off. This lead me to the idea of buying a cheap 4x4 to thrash around some pay and play off-roading days. Arguably safer and the wife and daughter can get involved, also parts and the overall running costs would be cheap.

I settled on a 2003 Suzuki Jimny JLX which I found on this forum. I looked at plenty of standard cars with the idea of applying the mods I wanted to be able to not get stuck everywhere, however it seemed better value to get a car with most things done already which I could use as a base to build on.
I agreed on a price with the seller on the phone and set off on the train the following day to Norwich to pick it up (some 200 miles away). I was a little anxious on the way up as it had 180k on the clock however the car was exactly as described and the seller was a top bloke, he's even thrown in a set of road tyres on he'd never mentioned before for me to drive home in (this is forum member vinnie's old car)

The drive back was pretty long, the ride is pretty hard and it's generally noisy at speed. It also doesn't like going much over 70 mph (which is 4k rpm+), 65mph felt like it's sweet spot on the motorway.

Here's the stuff which had been done when I picked up the car:
- 2 inch suspension lift
- adjustable panhard rods
- extended brake lines
- snorkel
- wheel spacers
- mud terrain tyres
- poly bushed all round

Pics from vinnie:












Setting off on my trip back!:

As the Jimny didn't want for anything immediately we decided to see what it could do at a local pay and play day. I've done some off-roading before in a friends Vitara but this place was quite a bit more hardcore than we'd originally thought! The tracks were pretty deep which had been dug by some of the more hardcore defenders with massive tyres...as soon as we'd entered to wood I'd managed get the Jimny beached about 200 yards from the car park....great start!



The Jimny only had the standard tow loops, lucky they held out this time however it was pretty clear I desperately needed to fit proper recovery points.

All in all though it was an awesome day out and I was properly hooked! A close mate had also picked up a Jimny around the same time, his is the silver one in the pictures.











I soon after set to work giving the thing a proper clean and polishing the headlights as they'd gone cloudy:






I also fit two prefabricated recovery points to the front and one to the rear. These are fitted by removing the bumpers and drilling into the chassis rails to mount them to. Once they are attached you need to cut holes in the bumpers for them to poke through.
For what was supposed to be a 2 hour job took me about 4 hours as the chassis rails at the front took forever to drill through.

Apologies for the lack of pictures however this is what they look like finished:

Now I could be a bit more confident off road safe in the knowledge I could be towed out, we set off to find some local green lanes and public byways.

We quickly found a 3.5 mile stretch of public byway linking Firle to Alfriston in East Sussex:

By this time I'd had the Jimny around 3 months and it was behaving faultlessly. It's not my main car but was starting to become pretty useful for weekend house work...its height means it can hold a surprising amount with the seats down.



We decided to hit another pay and play day, this time we headed off to Slindon (West Sussex)

This site was not chalky like the wood, this was full on mud!















Lee (owner of the silver Jimny) got stuck this time round, it was time to make use of those new recovery points!




With a whole day of wadding through muddy water we both had some pretty serious overheating issues on the way home. Both of our radiators were clogged solid with mud and both cars hit the red on the temp gauge as soon as we hit the main road. We stopped at the nearest jet wash to try and blast as much of the mud out of the radiator which made a difference however we still had to stop a further three times on the way home to let the cars cool.

Once I got home I soaked the radiator in mud-off spray normally used on mountain bikes which appeared to sort the issue for the time being.

A few weeks later and it was MOT time! It failed on:

- Offside front wheel brakes stuck on (didn't even notice!)
- Excessive play in the near side front hub bearing

I got the car home and started to try to free the brake caliper. It appeared to be pretty gummed up with mud!



The piston was seized solid, I decided to replace it with a new/refurbed one:



The excessive play was down to the kingpin bearings failing, with work being quite full on I gave the car to a local garage to change the bearings and I had a new 12 month ticket. There was one advisory for a cracked transfer box mount which I'll address in the coming months.

Fast forward to this week and that car is still getting hot when off-roading. I'd also discovered that there was no heat coming from the vents which is not great in this cold weather.

I set to work replacing the radiator, flushing the cooling system and unblocking the heater matrix by forcing clean water through it.

Looks a sweet Jimny!

Glad you're having fun with it.

A "well done Vinnie" in order methinks.

Glad to see you're having fun. This reminds me of when we started out in our old SJ!

Kirkynut