BREAK

Most of us have bad habits. Whether it’s riding the clutch, picking our noses in public, shouting abuse at the television when Donald Trump’s face appears… well, maybe that one isn’t a bad habit as such, but you know what I mean.

It can be hard to imagine why a habit would form, particularly if you’re not the person who has it. Riding the clutch? Well duh, just don’t ride the clutch. Same with picking your nose, says a person who doesn’t do that, though I typed this with one hand while biting the nails on the other one.

Talking of things you do with one hand, you’ll remember the old wives’ tale about a certain habit making you go blind. You may recall discovering that it didn’t, and continued not to, and here we are all grown-up and fingers crossed (well, the fingers on one hand, anyway) it still hasn’t.

It’s risky, though. Our editor likes to say of vehicles that the first dent is the deepest. He demonstrated this perfectly with his old Nissan Patrol, which started off looking like new and was never meant to become an off-road disaster area. But then one day on the Triangle Vert he slid it round a tight corner and put a dent in the door. Then his girlfriend had an accident with a Chinese takeaway and the carpet on her side turned orange. Then the air-conditioning in his Cherokee packed in just when he was about to set out a roadbook on one of the hottest days of the year, so he used the Patrol instead and it turned out to be a roadbook full of tightly packed trees. And before long, his pristine wagon was a beaten up wreck with a cabin that looked like a skip.

And that’s how it goes. Bit by little bit. You start off by jumping in with your mate for a bit of offroad fun. You discover that it is fun, right enough.

Above: James first modified the suspension by adding simple extended shackles to give a two-inch lift. These have since been replaced with Z-shackles, which open and rotate to allow much greater articulation

Top right: Wheel travel is aided by the choice of shocks – Pro-Comp ES3000s went on all round for their combination of good travel with decent reliability and a sensible price

Above right: Spring over axle conversion adds a couple of inches to the vehicle’s overall height. Ultimate under-axle ground clearance remains the same, of course, but approach and departure are improved still further

Right: The front wings were removed to leave room for unhindered articulation. In their place is a home-brewed tubular affair carrying a set of deformable wheelarches

So you buy a truck of your own, but you’re not going to modify it. But you see how much better they can be with just a little work. So you do a little work, and it’s a lot better, so you figure that if you do a little more it’ll be a lot better still and soon enough you’re up to the neck building a fullhouse proto.

That’s how the off-road bug bites. And while the creation you’re looking at here is not quite a proto, it certainly is modified. So much that you might be struggling to figure out what it is.

The answer is not a Range Rover, but that’s where the story began for its builder, James Firth. Way back when, he jumped in with his mate to see what this off-roading lark is all about, and a few ride-outs later his mate’s old-shaper had convinced him that he needed a truck in his life.

Range Rovers are good at doing that, but once you get to know them they can also be good at convincing you that whatever kind of 4x4 you buy, it should be anything but a Range Rover. James went to the opposite end of the scale, at any rate, deciding that what he needed in his life was a ‘cheap little Suzuki’. What he got was an SJ, and they didn’t come any cheaper and littler than that.

And so it began. With the SJ on his driveway, James decided that a set of mud-terrains would be a good idea. And while he was at it, he reasoned he may as well hike the suspension up a couple of inches as well.

This didn’t kill him, or make him go blind. Remember what we were saying about how habits form. Two or three years later, he was admitting to us that ‘I suppose I’ve found it hard to know where to stop. There’s always something that will enhance the SJ’s abilities in the rough.’

Compared to the current specification, James’ first round of modifications to the SJ appears relatively restrained. He replaced the standard road tyres with a set of 31” remoulds, having made room beneath the arches by raising the leaf springs by two inches.

He did this by keeping the original springs but extending their shackles. And guess what? The

Left: The original 1.3-litre Samurai engine has given way to an 8-valve Vitara 1.6. This does an adequate job in conjunction with an SJ410 transfer case

Right: Inboard fuel tank is located in the rear bed, just below the high-lift jack mountings on the roll cage’s rear stays

Suzuki now handle like a plate of jelly glued to the top of a pogo stick.

The result was that James decided to keep his SJ mainly as an off-road vehicle. And the result of THAT was that no longer fettered by the need to keep it drivable every day, he was able to start going more extreme with it. A Loc-Rite diff soon appeared in the rear axle. Then an SJ410 transfer case replaced the SJ413 unit, and now it was capable of crawling over just about anything. The transformation was such that the next item on the shopping list was four-point harnesses. ‘Even at slow speeds, things can go wrong,’ says James, and how right he is. ‘I’d sooner be strapped into a racing harness if I’m hanging upside down than relying on a normal seatbelt to save me.’

As this demonstrates, more often than not one mod leads to another. But while this certainly is true, by now James was hooked on off-roading –and the habit was proving hard to kick.

So it’s something of a surprise to learn that the SJ stayed in this state for a fair time before he at- tacked it with a carving knife to create the animal you see here. ‘I got talking to someone who had their own workshop,’ he says. ‘We decided to have a play with the pipe bender and welder. The result was this thing!’

In fact, James’ original intention had been to convert the SJ into a pick-up. Once the process of removing the rear bodywork had commenced, however, he realised that it had more holes in it than one of those planets in The Clangers. (Trust 4x4 to bring you all the most up-to-date cultural references.) So either an entirely new body would need to be found for the chassis (which itself was in reasonably good order), or something more dramatic would have to ensue.

The latter option rapidly became the favoured one, because the idea of building something completely different was now sounding kind of fun. So while the angle grinder was being waved about, the guys lopped off the SJ’s front wings. Well, if you’re going to trayback it at the rear and end up with enough wheel travel to be seen from space, you want to balance it up at the front as well.

So it was that James’ Suzuki came to look like something from the set of Mad Max. Something from the set of Mad Max that had been created using the front end from a Vitara, most people tend to assume.

In fact, the lights and grille were taken from a Mitsubishi Space Wagon and modified to sit neat- ly atop a steel bumper James bought from a local fabricator. This provided a home for a 9500lb Champion winch, which is more than enough to get an SJ out of trouble and let him rescue more other off-roaders he might find stranded too.

So it’s not a Vitara, but it is in the engine department. In place of the original 1.3, James dropped in a 1.6-litre 8-valve unit from Suzuki’s erstwhile hairdresser’s favourite – which, combined with the factory gearbox and that 410 transfer case, got it moving very nicely indeed throughout the range of speeds he was ever likely to drive it at.

At this point, let me refer you back to what James was saying about four-point harnesses and being upside down. Having made the SJ more capable than ever of tackling the sort of terrain which means that when you mess up, you mess up big, he broke out the aforementioned bender and made up a full eight-point exo cage.

Not that he was planning to turn the vehicle over, of course, and he spaced out the wheels by 30mm to give it that bit more stability as the ride height and centre of gravity went up. Which it did, and in a rather more sophisticated fashion than when he first chucked a set of extended shackles under it. In our photos, it’s running a SPOA conversion, giving it an extra couple of inches, as well as James’ own custom-made Z-links instead of those old shackles. These are designed both to swivel and open, like a pair of scissors being held in someone’s hand, to create multi-directional travel at each corner. Given that the four wheels are literally positioned at the extremities of the vehicle, this makes for mightily impressive ability to follow the contours of the ground.

The springs and shackles are backed up by Pro-Comp ES3000 shocks, which have always been popular with off-roaders for the amount of articulation they allow. The same company’s steering damper is in place, too, as are a set of jackable rock sliders, an inboard petrol tank and a 90-amp Range Rover alternator. Aha! So that first ride in his friend’s old Classic DID rub off on him after all!

As you can see from all this, the days when this was ‘a cheap little Suzuki’ are well in the past. It’s definitely not an example of a conventional build, but it certainly a classic case of how modifying your 4x4 can be very habit-forming. At least it’s also proof that not every habit is a bad one.