Heh, heh, heh, oh yes, the springs. We found a wrecked Ford Mondeo on it's roof in a breakers yard and took the rear springs off of it. Then we jacked our Uno up and removed the rear springs. The Mondeo springs fit perfectly only they were a little too long so we had to cut a ring and a half off of each one. That gave us a lift of about 4". We couldn't find another Mondeo to get more springs for the front so we ended up adding the old rear springs alongside the existing front ones. This also gave us about 4" of lift. The cable ties were originally used to hold them together during fitting but we never bothered to remove them. In fact, only 1 cable tie broke during the journey when the front right springs came partially out of alingment during a particularly bumpy drive through the Sahara. Cable ties are magic!
If you're wondering why we needed 4" of lift, bear in mind there were 3 big guys in the car, with all our stuff, our spare parts (including 4 wheels with tyres!), tools, food, spare fuel (60 litres) and water over extremely rough terrain, including soft sand, so we needed as much lift as possible. Even with the 4" lift we grounded out every so often.
The bumpers were cut back for the same reason.
I know Beau had previously had a lot of problems with the car but the only thing wrong with it when we got it, was a flat tyre, a dead battery and a blown fuse.
If you haven't read the diary, we did also have the head gasket blow on us 60km into Morocco but Morocco is FULL of Fiat Unos (they use them as taxis!) so it only took 1 day and about 70 quid for a local mechanic to fix it.
I have no plans for future trips (I have a young family) but my colleagues were so bitten that they've brought a Land Cruiser with the intention of touring Africa for a year and then South America for another year (NOW THAT IS MAD!)
I know the web site doesn't have a lot of pictures so I'll get some more put up and let you know when they are there - when finished with all the
stickers, etc... she looked the business!
