MilkyRon's Very Modest Modifications

Picked my new Jimny up last week. Managed to find a nice 2006 model with 55K miles, full undercoating, new kingpins, recent pad and disk replacement and generally really clean for the age. Here it is in all it's glory:



Success! The dog fits.



When I bought it, it had tyres from 4 different manufactures fitted. First 'modification' was 5 Hankook Dynapro RF10 in 195/80/15




Having spent years thinking about getting one, I've not been disappointing, in fact I've been pleasantly surprised. I drove it home on the first day 60 miles on the motorway, it held 70mph comfortably with still some pull left to overtake. The handling is spot on, as long as you have realistic expectations. The stereo isn't even as bad as I thought it was going to be. So far, I'm chuffed to bits with it and I'm looking forward to slowly bankrupting myself as I add more and more things to it that I nor the car really need.

Ta, MilkyRon

Nice!

A BigJimny welcome to the forums Ron!

Pleased top see youre happy that the pooch fits. Dont let him/her do back-seat driving though!

One thing that had really been bugging me about my Jim since I picked it up


As you can see, someone had decided the spare wheel mount would look better in silver. They didn't do the most professional of jobs...



Off came the mount and out came the angle grinder and wire sanding disks. Top tip: When using wire disks, it's best to avoid sanding anything at groin height. After removing the molten hot, razor sharp wires from my gentleman's area I moved onto some sand paper and elbow grease. The pictures probably don't do it justice but it was an absolute mess.

After all that work I probably should have put a bit more effort into the painting stage but Hammerite was all I had to hand and I was running out of weekend.

The end result



Unfortunately, there was some surface rust on the boot door under the mount, I cleaned it up as best as I could and added a layer of ACF-50 to try to prevent any further spread. A job for another weekend, maybe.

Welcome along.

I'm glad you and your dog like it!

Kirkynut

Took advantage of the good weather we had this weekend and thought I'd address the front body rust. Unfortunately I got a bit delayed by the original front bumper fixings. Can't for the life of me think why Suzuki decided to use Phillips head bolts. So after a few hours drilling them out with some left handed drill bits, I had the front bumper off. Next was the lights, after removing the two bolts, I gave them a good yank to remove the two retaining lugs. They ended up taking quite a bit of steel with them



You can see on the close up how much of the mount was lost on the right



So then it was a few hours masking everything off and cleaning up the rust as best as I could using the trusty wire brush and angle grinder. I'd decided I wasn't bothered about matching the colour as the end goal is preventing any further rust as apposed to making it look pretty. Picked up some Hammerite Straight to Rust Silver. Didn't really trust the 'Straight to Rust' part so went with some rust reforming primer first.



Ended up going through a whole can to cover the rust up, even after all the elbow grease. Then it was on with the Hammerite.



I'm pretty happy with the end result. Time will tell If I've stopped the spread of rust. In hindsight, I should have removed the wheel arch covers and done the wheel arches while I was at it but I was running low on paint and time due to all the faffing about with the bumper removal. Luckily, I had some nice stainless steel flanged hex bolts which i used in place of the old Phillips head ones. Due to having to drill them out, the thread was lost so a nut was put on the end. This was really fiddly to get on so I'll be replacing the M6 with some M8s and tapping a new thread.

The tinkering will have to wait for a few weeks while I have the driveway extended (to accommodate the Jim). I'm determined to get the wheel arches and boot de-rusted before the salt spreading in the winter. Will probably use Hammerite again, unless anyone has any horror stories!

Excellent write-up Ron.

Good motivational stuff to get me doing that to mine!

Hey Ron

That don't looks much better now, I recently had to do all that with mine but after it being welded by someone first so you should be glad you got to it before it got that bad.

Re your nuts and bolts, might be worth looking at a rivet nut gun, I got one for fixing the bumper back on after a body lift, and it might save you some fiddly tapping of threads. Think it was about 15 quid

Me and my Jimny wrote: Hey Ron

That don't looks much better now, I recently had to do all that with mine but after it being welded by someone first so you should be glad you got to it before it got that bad.

Re your nuts and bolts, might be worth looking at a rivet nut gun, I got one for fixing the bumper back on after a body lift, and it might save you some fiddly tapping of threads. Think it was about 15 quid

Nice one! I've just taken a look at one of those rivet nut guns, it does look like it would be a lot easier than trying to tap a new thread upside down under the car.

Rivnuts?

...A huge pia when they wear; break or strip the thread. We used to use them on aircraft. Thank goodness Airbus never liked them :lol: