After Mike Harris first bought this Suzuki Samurai, he discovered that it had a dark secret. “It looked perfect when I bought it,” Mike recalls. “People kept saying how nice and clean and rust-free it was. But then I started doing a lot of off-roading, and I was finding that every time I took it off-road I was leaving bits of it behind!”
As it turned out, Mike’s Samurai wasn’t as rust free as he thought. Someone had done a lot of bodywork on it, and the body was loaded with body filler. Mike continued modifying the Sami for a while, but finally decided that he had to deal with the rust issue. Mike collected the replacement panels that he would need, and then had the Samurai blasted to remove all of the rust and filler. Mike said that lumps were coming out all over the place from the process.
What he got back looked pretty hair-raising. But however crinkly, hole-shot or just plain not there it was, at least it was made of metal, not filler. And so, two years after he first bought the Suzuki, the project could really begin.
Obviously, it started with welding. Lots and lots and lots of endless, soul-destroying welding of the sort that would make a grown man cry. Mike was barely out of school at this point, so you’ve got to hand it to him for not giving up. “Fortunately, I hadn’t discovered beer and women by that point!” he says now…
Mike buys and sells bits from old Suzuki’s as a sideline, but even then it took a while to come by everything he needed. Still, the end result was a vehicle that combines the shell, chassis and rear door of the original, with the front end, doors, hood, fuel tank, wheel arches, grille and dashboard from a 1995 Samurai. Sorted. All he had to do now was, er, paint it.
When it came to building it back up, he had a plan. A plan involving some real lift, stacks of travel, and axles that weren’t going to put up the white flag on the first rough trail.
Mike lucked out on a set of Interco Boggers that he found on ebay.
This build may have been done at home in Mike’s spare time, but this was by no means a cheap build.
You don’t stuff your axles with Lock-Rights and 26-spline Rock Assault chromoly halfshafts and CVs without putting your hand in your pocket, for example, and nor do you come back from Rob Storr’s with a high-steer kit and fully floating back end conversion.
Further extreme shopping yielded axle trusses, diff guards and SPOA saddles from Off Road Armoury, a Muddy Zook adaptor plate for the 16-valve Vitara engine Mike was using, a Rockwatt Rock Bucket, Trail Gear Bone Shackles and Missing Links for the front suspension and a Granite Bashers DIY front bumper kit.
Mike went through various phases of trying to decide how he wanted the bumper to look, before cutting off a lot of metal in the upper part of it and trying to line it up visually with the roll cage. He went through a lot of cable ties during this part of his life, but finally got it the way he wanted and was able to move on to details like getting the engine to run.
Mike swapped in a Vitara engine, but had to spend hours of endless painstaking fault tracing to get the engine to stay running. Afterwards, his faith in multi-point systems was pretty much shot. ‘Far too complicated! Give me something simple any day…’.
Another teeth-gnashing moment came courtesy of the Toyota Land Cruiser driveshafts he was modifying to work with the Suzuki transmission and axles. “I’ve got SJ axles, so of course I had some SJ differential flanges machined up to fit the driveshafts. But then I remembered that I’m running Vitara differentials! The thread pitch on the splines is different, so the whole job had to get done again.”
This counts as nothing more than one of those ‘doh!’ moments that happen to us all from time to time, but it does point up an important truth about projects like this.
“Everything you work on is different,” explains Mike. “That’s what happens when you modify everything, of course. All the silly little things that would take a few minutes if it was all standard take hours instead. Mounting the power steering reservoir, for example – that ended up taking me an hour and a half!”
This perhaps begins to illustrate why the build took so long, but in truth that was really because Mike was only ever able to do it in his spare time while things like going to college and earning the money to pay for it got in the way (they do that). There was an element of finding his way as he went along, too – not in terms of workshop skills, though he does say that when you’re faced with what he had to take on in the early days of the project, “you learn to weld pretty quick,” but with the details of the way the truck came together.
Overall, the Samurai turned out great, and will likely be an inspiration for others to follow.
Nice job Mike!
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