Frontera Body Lift Part 2 – Preparation

Seeing as my Frontera was 12 years old and had been subjected to lots of road salt I wanted to limit any potential problems with getting all the body mounting bolts and bumper bolts undone.  So several days before starting the lift I went round all of the bolts and gave the exposed threads a good wire brushing and soaked them with penetrating oil.  This was repeated daily and then on the last day I carefully removed the 6 rear bolts that go into captive nuts on the body, cleaned and greased them then refitted so come the day of the lift I was not gonna have any grief from rusty nuts!!

I also gave it the once over and checked that where the wiring loom, brake pipes, fuel lines and coolant pipes cross from the body to chassis there was enough slack to accomodate the lift.  So far so good, with minor tweaking of the various clips it looked like these would give me no problems.

Frontera Body Lift Part 1 – Research

Back in March 2008 I started planning a body lift for my Frontera.  Why?  Two main reasons, I wanted more clearence for the sills when climbing over stuff and I needed to squeeze a set of 33″ tyres under the arches.  There were a few  little problems to overcome, first was there was not a supplier in the UK who could provide a 2″ body lift kit for the Frontera and the other was the relative lack of information regarding what modifications were required to complete this job.  At the time there were a few other Frontera’s running a 2″ or 3″ body lift but very little definate information on what was required.

There is a 1.5″ body lift kit available using aluminium spacers but I was looking for that little bit more.  After some more searching I found a guy who was supplying kits for Pajero’s up to 4″ high and made out of an Engineering plastic.  He was running the 4″ kit on his Pajero and I ended up buying one of his 2″ kits, junking the bolts and sourcing my own for the Frontera.

Looking at the spec of the material used, it was as strong and durable as the aluminium spacers but had one big advantage, being plastic they do not corrode as aluminium does when in contact with steel.

Introducing My Truck

Just introducing my truck.  Its a Vauxhall Frontera 2.8 TDi LWB, 1995 model and have owned it for just over 2 years.  Shortly after buying I ‘got the bug’ and the modifications and mud play started!

Currently it is running the following spec

• 2.5″ suspension lift
• 2″ body lift
• +2″ Procomp Shocks
• 33″ Cooper STT Discoverer tyres on 8″x16″ black mods
• Calmini front upper suspension arms

It also had a rear LSD off an Isuzu Trooper for a while but this has been ditched pending the installation of some auto lockers in the front and rear diffs.

Future plans, well there are loads, just need to find the time and money to get it all sorted, in the meantime a picture from a recent laning session

Recent laning trip in Wales