First of all, I'm a die-hard Chevy fan. I've owned 3 vehicles in my life and every one has been a 4x4 and every one has been a Chevy so if you had come up to me (even a month before we bought the samurai) and told me that I was going to be buying a samurai, I would have laughed in your face and told you that no 4-wheeler in his right mind would drive a vehicle with less than 8 cylinders much less a vehicle that wasn't a chevy.
Well, one day in November I decided to go on a 4-wheeling expedition with a local club (The BC SouthCoast Allterrainers) and a couple friends up to Hutt Lake just past Squamish, BC. Our participation in this day trip was organized by my friend Dave (click to see Dave's page) who had recently bought a Cherokee and wanted to go out with the members of this club to see if he wanted to join. I invited my roomate Dave to come along as my co-pilot and off we went.
While we were airing down at the beginning of the trail a group of built samurai's drove up. I glanced over and wasn't too interested. Dave on the other hand, who used to own a stock samurai and has always liked them and always had good things to say about their off-road abilities, went over to check out the rigs. The took off ahead of us and then we got going.
We ended up meeting up with them again at Lower Hutt Lake. Now when we got there, there was a samurai sitting on it's back end. The guy was trying to drive up this 7 foot high rock that was a nearly vertical climb to the top. He had gotten hung up on his backend on his first attempt. His buddy pulled him back and he tried it again only this time he hammered the gas and with a scrape and a thump he was up on top of the rock. Apparently with open diffs in both ends. I was impressed, that pretty much sold me on the idea.
All the way home Dave and I talked about the possibility of us buying a Samurai together and building it up, splitting the costs and the work, so that in the end we'd have an ultimate trail machine that we could take out on the weekends. As soon as we got home we started looking around for used Samurai's. I also started looking around on the net to see what others had to say about them. There were tons of sites dedicated to Samurai's and lots of good things said about their off-road abilities. This sealed the deal and in November '98 we picked up an '85 Suzuki Samurai. Along with it we got an extra transfer-case, engine, transmission, and a ton of other stuff. It already had a newer 1600 cc. engine in it and it ran great.