Project Pickle - shocking (part 11)

I wouldn't be surprised, if one of you confesses that he or she would have loved to see a bit of very, very proper shock and leafspring swapping action in preparation for a serious lift and the like. Unfortunately the truth is, this is going to be used on the road a lot as my daily and not too much time actually off-road. Throw in a bit of budget-mindedness and you end up with Indian Army Maruti Gypsy shocks, because they are cheap, hopelessly overdampened and at least look very, very rugged. 

I started at the rear and because the fuel tank was out of the car at the time, it was very easy to get a ratchet onto the top mounting bolt. Also: hammer-time. The rubbers were stuck on pretty good. 

Their time had come.

With quite a bit of vaseline on the rubbers the new ones went on without much drama. But as I really didn't like the washers that came with the shocks, I drilled out some stainless ones on the lathe as essentially it's only the compressed rubber holding them in place. 

Front ones required a bit of angle grinder action to get removed and a polite bit of unsolicited advice to all the boys and girls reading the following: There are two nuts, because you don't have to run the first one all the way to the bottom, but only down to the point where it compresses the rubber nicely. The second nut is meant to stop the first one from coming loose. Throw in some (a lot) of anti-seize, so you can undo it at a later stage and you can even swap the rubbers, when they have perished. (The stock front shocks were rusty, but would have still been usable...)

That was basically "it". Rather unceremoniously that's four shocks on all corners... but the lil' Zook has five of them. Number five's a MASSIVE steering damper, which unlike on other cars (I am looking at you Lada Niva!) actually does some notable damping. 

Plenty of vaseline to install the rubbers in the eyes and (again) Indian Army spare parts, Maruti steering damper is very, heavy duty and if it weren't for the fact that it returned to the center position, I could have sworn they just sent me another rear shock absorber. 

Vaseline on the rubbers, anti-seize on the bolts and it should be no drama to take it off in a few years, should the need arise.

As this is sort of one of the very first forays into the technical side of the Suzuki, I have to admit, I am quite pleased with what I found. It is a very, very straight forward vehicle. Which deliberately shall not be referred to as "a car" as that would be a bit on the misleading side, if I am honest. Next time: how to get it running again and make it run properly... again?

Project Pickle - How to install BMW 3-series (e36) seats in a Suzuki SJ (part 10)

I'll put it out straight away: the stock seats were never an option. Not because the stock seats in a Suzuki SJ are particularly bad or the like, but just because the ones in this specific Suzuki were disgusting. As such I started to look around what other people fitted into Suzukis and while customer bucket seats would definitely scored high in the style department, I wanted foldable seats, so the rear bench would still be (theoretically) usable. Aside from the usual Honda CRX and Suzuki Swift GTI seats, which due to popularity had become rather pricy, the only real option was to get a pair BMW 3-series (e36) seats. They are rather narrow (only 50cm at the front mounting points) and pretty low, which resulted in the seating position actually being  two or three centimeters lower than stock. On top of all that the BMW seats have height adjustment as well. With an asking price of 50 Euros for a quite well used pair of the most basic seats out of an e36 compact, it did NOT take very long to decide that these were the seats to go. So, with no further adue, please  follow me into what I can call at best an experience with a very steep learning curve. As you will be no doubt able to tell by the way the car (and the seasons) change, this took quite a while and ultimately it would be three iterations, to mount the seats in a way I found acceptable.

First attempt: Mockup and first attempt by using up some old square profile. Turns out in order for this to work properly, one should have welded in the transmission tunnel perfectly square, so there's quite a bit more room on the passenger side than on the driver side.

In order to clear the transmission tunnel, I assumed it would be best, if I simply went up a bit and so I made some approx. 30mm spacers.

While this worked, it resulted in sitting way too high up and having only very limited room between steering wheel and legs. Also in hindsight, it's quite obvious that the driver's seat wasn't in the lowest position.

Attempt number two did away with the spacers and I bought some fresh 35mm box-section with a beefy 4mm wall thickness, which was exactly twice of what the scrap bits sported. 

As the floor aside from the reinforcement ribs is "a tad" bent, it quickly turned out that a bit of a rethink was due (again) and whilst I could keep the outer sections, I had to modify the inner ones. For legal reasons, I wanted to use the mounting points of the OEM seat mounting bolts. Actually if you have a stock SJ/Samurai outside of India and think to yourself: Mine's looking substantially different in this area, you're absolutely right and yes again, I could have reverted mine to the conventional setup, but with no stock seats, why not start with a blank slate. (The obvious answer, because then I could have ignored to bowed floor pan...)

So on the transmission tunnel side, the seat would be mounted on a pair of additional tabs.

And here's the final result for the passenger side.

It sucked. Big time. If I wanted to build a BMW rocking chair inside a Suzuki, I would have perfectly succeeded. But obviously this wasn't the plan. Also it was an absolute p.i.t.a. to install and it looked so terrible that I wondered how to sneak it past the inspection guys in the garage.

As such a third and final attempt was needed. The brute-force approach was substituted with a thinner walled C-channel and the (not too dumb, if I may say so) idea that the seats should sit on a separate frame, which is then bolted to the floor pan. On top of that installation should be possible without any additional spanners, i.e. all the nuts for the seats have to be welded to the frame. 

So the basic frame idea was pretty good, but there was still some room for improvement.

Drilled holes in the top to allow easier positioning and better access to the allen head bolts, which fasten the seat base to the floor. All you had to do after that was to put the seat on top, again line up the holes and you're done.

Stealthy flat black for the win.

That's it, once you know how it's done and have the right material it's a matter of two or three hours plus the time it takes for the paint to dry and you can install BMW seats in your Suzuki. Otherwise it takes more than a month and multiple attempts.