swellestgorgons rig

After 3 years and 10s of thousands of dollars building my 96 r33 skyline and actually managing to get it on the road for 6 months i decided i wasnt happy with it and back in the garage it went. At this time i needed a knew daily driver, seeming as a lot of my friends started getting 4wds to replace their sports cars i decided id look for something with a swb.

As my fiance needed her car back for uni i had just a few weeks to find something that fit my criteria, after deciding on a suzuki jimny or seirra i couldnt find anything in my price range that was practical as a daily or wasnt completely clapped out. On the verge of giving up and settling for a small hatchback i stumbled across a 1.6 litre swb silver pajero io on gumtree for the pricely sum of $4000 and picked it up the next day.

After getting the io on monday afternoon, I drove it to work on tuesday and realised i had the queerest car in the car park other than the smart car which turned up occasionally, that afternoon i organised with a mate to go for a quick drive in the bush out the back of his house in the mud so we could figure out what sort of a base we had to play with.

My mate having a lifted ranger with 33" mt's had no issue getting through the 100 metre mud run and i got through ok as well, then we tried to come back, after the ranger had so kindly ripped up the track i got caught up on my diff and highway terrain tyres probably didnt help my cause. Off we went back to my mates house to get the snatchy, but on trying to take an alternative path to get in a better position to snatch me out we managed to get the ranger stuck as well, FML. So we called our soccer coach knowing he had his turbo v8 troopy and figured he'd be able to give us some assistance, not knowing it didnt even have an lsd in it and him also getting stuck we now haad 3 people bogged and getting dark. Being stuck for 3 hours isnt fun and left us with know choice but to call in the nissan patrols and wait another hour for them to turn up only to listen to their crap about real 4wds etc etc lol.

So my journey started on giving my little 'soft roader' the ablity to go the majority of places the bigger 4wd's can go.

My first step was a new set of federal couragia at's (225-75-16 all round) for the front and putting the slightly worn at's off the front on the back at the expense of the ht's and a full service of all engine and drivetrain fluids replacing them with nulon synthetic oils and adding nulon g20 additive, which i'd recommend for all driveline parts as it has had the same effect as using redline shockproof gear oil in mine and mates diffs and gearboxes. I followed this with some 25mm strut top spacers which brought the front a bit more level with the rear.

this made quite a difference and on a trip up to landcruiser mountain at jimna got me through most of the intermediate tracks that a lot of people didnt expect me to do and allowed me the satisfaction of pulling a mates patrol out of a mud hole on a track that i made it through easily.

Seeing a few shortfalls on my setup, on my return i decided it needed some love. I started researching lifts and saw that some people had questioned the possibility of outlander struts, hilux rear shocks and ba astina springs with adjustable commodore panhad rod, so i started by getting the springs and panhard rod which was easy enough, i think the springs cost me about $70 complete with the shocks as the wreckers wouldnt allow me to seperate them and the panhard rod came from ebay seller suzuki super 4x4 for $85 posted.