If you are looking to improve your ride quality, your vehicles offroad capability, enhance your camp comfort or even just have the best bloody mall crawler in town, don’t worry because we have some of the best bits of advice for making the most efficient modifications to your vehicle, to make sure you are hitting the tracks sooner without blowing the budget and all well within the timeframe of your up coming trip of a lifetime!

There is no doubting the effectiveness of throwing time and money at your 4WD to get the best upgrades completed in next to no time – by simply paying the bloke at the store to fit your selected accessories and upgrades we are certain that you can save stacks of time, but there are a handful of reasons why we suggest you give it a crack and try to DIY upgrade your 4WD by yourself or with some help from your mates!

The first reason you should attempt your DIY upgrades is because when you have the responsibility of turning all the wrenches on your vehicle, you learn how all the pieces go together like a jigsaw puzzle. This means that if anything goes wrong when you hit the tracks you’ll know where every nut and bolt on your 4WD is making that expedient bush repair a piece of cake compared to that guy on your trip who just gives it to “the guy” to fix!

The second reason you should attempt to Do It Yourself, is the massive labour savings – of course time is money, and when you are putting in the sweat equity you are paying with your time, but with all the lessons you’ll learn on the way, you’ll basically be a mechanic by the time you are done!

LED DRIVING LIGHTS

The first upgrade many 4WDers turn to is a set of LED Driving lights or an LED Lightbar no matter what you like to do with your 4WD the most versatile improvement is equipping your 4WD with the ability to blast out thousands more lumens than the factory headlights can put out!

We aren’t talking about your wimpy old factory fog lights here – When shopping around for high quality LED lighting, many people get drawn into the trap of purchasing the most expensive set of LED Driving lights on the market fooled into thinking they will be somehow brighter, tougher or even just lower power draw than some of the less expensive models on the market – however when comparing some of the nearest competitors for LED Light output with the BRAND NEW Domin8r 9” LED Driving light pair compare almost identically for stats with some brands that are charging near double the price (whilst also having less advertised range).

Fitted with 40x extremely bright and highly efficient Osram LED light diodes, the Domin8r 9” also includes a smart wiring harness which is truly plug and play, having smart sensing circuitry which can sense whether the input is negatively switched or not.

To fit these high-powered LED spotties simply open the packaging and make sure that all the required components are there, fasten your brand-new LED Spotlights to your bull bar, using both of the supplied 3 bolt stainless steel brackets. Fit loosely as you may need to adjust them later for appropriate aiming!

Now the lights are installed, select the appropriate included Headlight adapter plug (*kit only includes H4 and HB3 plugs) remove your headlight high beam plug from the rear of the bulb and insert the adapter between the factory wiring and the headlight, you can now lay out your wiring harness to connect the appropriate terminals, making sure to avoid hot or moving components in the engine bay, locate the position for your relay, and the Hot 12v+ wire and main earth wire near the battery to easily fasten. And run the toggle switch wiring through a convenient hole in the firewall to operate within the cab of the vehicle.

Connect all of your wiring and check the fuse and all waterproof deutsch plugs for security, once confident of the wiring, turn your ignition on and switch your headlights on. For proper operation the high beam operation should toggle the insanely bright LED Spotlights on and off via the wiring harness!

Installed in under 1 hour – you now have reliable track lighting to suit nearly any track at any time of night!

SUSPENSION ENHANCEMENTS

They say “there are a million ways to skin a cat” and many people look to enhance the ride height of their 4WD to gain additional clearance when driving offroad – to get your vehicles body riding high, you can install many components. But when modifying your vehicle you should never take safety for granted, this is why cheap upgrades like “spring spacers” and other such gimmicks shouldn’t be installed!

If you are chasing ground clearance, there is only one real way to do this safely and that is with a complete suspension upgrade kit, whilst you will gain extra height as desired however you will also gain longer travel shock absorbers, along with a purpose designed spring rate for your higher vehicle. With a full suspension kit, you will have better control on road, and will often get a much more comfortable ride offroad with purpose designed components.

With a mechanics service and repair manual for your specific vehicle you will be able to read in fine detail which nuts bolts spacers washers go where, and exactly how tight they need to be to be safe.

A Service manual will come in handy on the tracks anyways so, get your hands on one, for a better idea  on how to make sure your 4WD stays safe!

Equipped with the knowledge you now need a suspension kit, again there are hundreds of brands on the market, with varying specialties from road racing to affordable daily driver suspension, when choosing a suspension brand, get your hands on a kit that is designed specifically for 4WDing such as the Raw 4×4 Suspension kits, with a kit tailored to nearly every application, they will make sure that accessories like bull bars and other constant loads on the vehicle will be factored in to not just the springs but the loads encountered by the shock absorbers.

Once you have your new suspension kit fitted in your 4WD you should head to your nearest tyre shop to get everything properly aligned this will make sure that your steering, tyres and road noise are un-effected, some independent suspension models find that their new suspension wears their tyres on the outside edges, whilst live axle models find their steering wheel may be crooked. A suspension alignment will mend all of this!

UHF COMMS!

The final upgrade no one should ignore is a reliable high powered built in UHF Radio – By fitting a UHF radio to your 4WD you have a reliable source of communication that will be able to talk to anyone with a UHF radio that is within range.

A 5W UHF offers the furthest possible range without requiring a broadcasting license and whilst the standard 3.5dBi – 4.5dBi antenna’s that are included with many UHF radio’s work great at transmitting a signal out to a reasonable range, for ultimate versatility and maximum range, a 6.5dBi antenna is perfect for getting the most from your 5W UHF system.

When looking at the performance of a UHF its hard to look past the value for money and performance you can get from an Oricom UHF380PK UHF unit. Not only does it include a higher power 6.5dBi antenna but it also includes a Z-bracket to install the antenna by your bonnet. Offering much better transmission than other models on the market – and an extremely easy to install with just 2 wires to the battery, and the antenna cable, you don’t even need to know how to solder or splice!

By installing all of these awesome accessories by yourself, you will know exactly how they work, and exactly how to fix anything that may go wrong when you are in the middle of nowhere, out of reach of your roadside assistance service.

So don’t wait, get out and get exploring with a smaller budget, and a better understanding of how your 4WD works and hit the tracks harder!