We all know what it’s like when you have a new project in front of you. All the exciting ideas, all the planning, all the compulsiveness pushing you to jump right in and start modding. Well, before you do that any adult in any room will suggest laying a good foundation so that’s what we must do: fully service our base vehicle and fix any issues we find.

Well, not exactly. We really could not resist throwing some BRAID wheels and new tires on it. In our defense we did have the wheels in stock and the tires were here too, having arrived with a batch of other tires for some of our vehicles, so they would take up less room mounted. Rationalization complete we mounted the tires and bolted them to the car. Not with the OE bolts of course. No, we got some longer studs and heat-treated nuts from our friends at Rennline. They might seem a bit too long but we wanted to leave room for spacers in case we felt the need later. They don’t half look baller (seat!) though.







If you are interested the wheels are Winrace T Beadlock B in 18x8 and the tires are 265/60-18 Falken Wildpeaks. The wheels have a unique to BRAID road legal beadlock system that was developed for DAKAR style rally raid events.

So with that out of the way we buckled down to some deferred maintenance and fixes. What did we do? First a full service: oil, trans fluids, brake fluid, all fluids basically.





And, what did we find to fix? The right rear strut bellows disintegrated when we looked at it, so that got replaced.







The driver’s door was sagging so we added a shim.

One of the parking lights was out so we changed the bulb. That didn’t fix it because...





Our B and C pillars were a bit manky. The silver anodizing had gone a bit cloudy so we covered them in black vinyl. Looks even better.





We replaced the battery that seemed to have trouble holding onto electrons. It’s under the driver’s seat and not so easy to get to.



The one repair we failed at was fixing an oil leak. We had determined it was probably coming from the valve cover gaskets but could not get the valve covers off. The rear lower bolts on each bank are notoriously hard to get a tool on but, despite cobbling together an array of custom gadgets we could not get any purchase on the torx heads of them. It appears that someone previously had maybe mangled them a bit and our torx bits kept slipping out. We did a tactical withdrawal to lick our wounds and may return to these one day soon. At least we didn’t make the oil leak worse.







So, with the boring stuff out of the way (except the wheels and tires of course) we’ll start modifying stuff to make it worthy of the name “TIMSYBERIA”