Turned axel's - good or bad?
 

Hello everyone.

Im thinking about buying a nice 86 HJ60 for some serious driving in Sahara. The only thing which makes me suspicios is that the previous owner has "turned the axel's", i.e. the axels are now sitting below the springs, which makes the car very high. Of course it looks nice but sometimes such homefittings are not as strong as the factory-solution.

If anyone has experience of this, Id be really happy for some advise. Is it good or bad.

Best,

Marcus

Hi,

The kwy thing with this sort of conversion is the quality of the actual work - was everything lined up correctly and how good is the welding.

Do you know who did the work?

Referred to as "SOA"... Spring Over Axle.

a couple of my mates here in town have done it to suzuki 413 jeeps and an old 109" land rover.
they did very back-yard engineering and they were a pig to drive, let along the spring wrap that occured.

also the steering drop arm needs to be extended by quite a lot, and (here in the UK) it's illegal (MoT failure) to weld onto any part of the steering linkage, so they're on very thin ice to start with.

coupled with the fact that most SOA vehicles have large tyres fitted (which is why the conversion is done in the first place... to give some clearance under the arches) they handled very poorly.

OK i suppose if you're just going mud plugging locally to home, if you break it you can get a tow home.

slightly different if you're 1000's of KM's in the middle of the sahara...

I've only ever seen one vehicle roll over and that was a spring over axel job. You are raising the centre of gravity and making the car very unstable - not what you need in the dunes:nono: