Congratulations on being selected for Auszookers Zook Owner of the Month!How does it feel being honoured with the nomination for Z.O.O.M. 2016?
It's overwhelming. I haven't felt this important since I beat the big kid in class at the 50m sprint at my grade two athletics carnival.
So tell us about yourself. Who are you, What's the meaning to your username, Where do you live, and what do you do for a living?
My name is Adam and my username is (boringly) a very Australian nickname bestowed upon me in a schoolyard thirty years ago. Being close friends with so many other 'Adams' at school it became pretty clear that referring to each other by our first names was never going to work, so naturally we all reverted to shortened versions of each other's last names. I had seven 'Adams' in my year seven class of twenty-eight students; I am still friends with most of them. Here is a photo of the name tags for the three groomsmen at my best mate's recent wedding:
I am a journalist according to a dusty uni degree I have in my office, but these days I work for 'Big Corporate' juggling numbers and driving a desk and pretending to be important. In my spare time I like long walks on the beach and arguing with anti-vaxxers on the internet.
I live in Manly in Brisbane and genuinely love where I live. This is the view from my boat ramp and the local watering hole with cheap pints and only a drunken stumble from my house:
How did you get started in Suzuki's & how many have you owned?I only got started in Suzuki's after getting spat out of the expensive side of the drag racing scene and went looking for cheap fun and cheap fabrication projects that even a bumblefuck like me could cobble together in a backyard shed. I grew tiresome of the 'chequebook racing' nature of drag racing, in which in order to perform you needed either limitless fabrication skills or limitless funds; ideally both. In my mid-20's I decided to grow up and buy a house so the funds disappeared entirely, and having the fabrication skills of a shaved chimp I soon realised that my go-fast days were numbered.
I found my happy place in cheap zooks and I much prefer the problem solving nature of the Suzuki scene. Conversations seem to revolve around how much you DIDN'T spend or how you found a cheaper or more efficient way of doing something. Home-builds and re-purposed parts are something to be proud of, rather than ashamed of. Solving a puzzle like that is far more exciting to me than paying a chassis shop and a gearbox shop and an engine shop to piece together a car for you while you blindly throw wads of cash at them like an eighteen year old at his first strip club.
How long did it take you to build your zook to what it is today?The GV never really got built completely. To be honest, it has been one of the best cars I have ever owned but the limitations of what I had originally planned to achieve and what it could do were realised fairly quickly. A couple of trips with klutched in his GV made me realise that changing CVs multiple times per trip was not something I was interested in dealing with and try as I might I could never solve the puzzle that is the front end of the GV - the Hilux CV options never gathered enough momentum before I ran out of puff. So I abandoned my original plans for a hardcore wheeler and left it as a mildly capable car and daily driver and it has done both in spades.
Driving the easy stuff on an NBS club run:
Trial-fitting 32's just because:
My current and ongoing build started off with me buying the bones of Tanshi's LJ81 project and taking off from there. It started off looking something like this when I got it from him:
And now looks something like this, somewhere in that pile of stuff
:
So far I have collected a bunch of other parts to throw at it, all of which are buried somewhere in the shambles above:
- 35" Creepy Crawlers
- Vit rear diff, shaved to within an inch of its life
- Disc rear
- J20a engine
- 6.5 transfer gears
- ADD chromo axles
I just need to find a suitable AW4 and it's all systems go.
Purdy:
Any changes in store for your Suzuki?In terms of the Soup Kitchen, one very major change is coming up: it's being sold.
The only reason for that is I need a fat tow pig to lug around the LJ so I have bought a land-barge of a V8 100-series for those duties. I am genuinely not looking forward to moving on the GV as it has been outstanding for what I use it for. I expect the 100 series to be shittier at everything except for the towing part.
Here is a picture of the hunk of junk I have replaced it with:
What has been your best modification?
For Soupy, undoubtedly the under-body armour. The underbody of a GV is a tangled mess of crossmembers like bulldozer blades and transfer cases that swing in the breeze. Mild lift and tyres helped, but both would have been almost useless without the belly plates.
What has been your worst modification?
None, really. I am a notorious over-thinker and I tend to over-analyse every modification I make before I so much as lift a spanner and if I can't see a benefit I won't bother embarking on it for the sake of it. Which is why so many of the big projects I had lined up for the GV (disc rear, floater, 4xfourart arms, et all) never actually made it out of their boxes and are still sitting in my shed.
For the LJ, the worst mod could end up being the 35" creepies; yet they could also be the best mod. They are heavy sons-of-bitches and once beadlocked and mounted I expect them to be 45+kg per corner. With a J20a pushing them that is asking a real lot of a zook driveline but I am throwing enough chromo gear at it that I am giving it a fighting chance. I tend to drive like I'm driving Miss Daisy these days, so fingers crossed I can keep the important bits in one piece.
If you could have anybody else's zook, who's would it be and why?Tanshi's Ring Ding, hands down. Fortunately I get to ride shotgun in his car fairly frequently but it is one of the most fun cars I have ever been in. It has the horsepower of a leaf-blower, the sound of a lawnmower on steroids, a wheelbase that makes the slightest of inclines butthole-puckeringly scary and a top speed of a bicycle. Everything about it is wrong, it is a complete handful to drive and its specs are (on paper) unsuited to just about any 4x4 situation... and yet I challenge anyone to find a more stupidly fun car to drive. I get sore cheeks from grinning like the Cheshire Cat every time I'm in it, and it's a constant crowd favourite on any hardcore wheeling run as it easily exceeds everyone's expectations by some margin. Including the guy driving it all day.
What has been your best 4wding trip?Probably the Coffs trip this year. Fantastic bunch of guys, some really hard stuff was tackled with a lot of breakages but not once did anyone seem to be having a terrible time. Like all things in life, attitude is key and that was a solid group of great guys intent on a great time no matter what broke or how long we were stuck halfway up Carnage for.
If you could go to any place in the world to wheel, where would that be?My wheeling wet-dream is to take a month or two off from work/life and go and build a zook to drive Ultimate Adventure. I have friends in the US that could possibly donate some shed space, so it's definitely something I would love to tick off my bucket list in the next year or twelve.
Who are you closest to in the auszooker's community?
Tanshi and I talk crap about zooks almost daily. We both drive desks for a living, so being able to wax lyrical about zook stuff and crazy schemes is a nice time-out from the daily grind. I also talk to klutched pretty regularly, but he's now caught the 'go-fast' bug we all do at 21 and now he tends to play more with Skylines than zooks these days.
I also annoy Scrawny and 31zook with some regularity. In fact, I've met a bunch of awesome humans since joining AZ, so sorry to those I left out. I love you all. <3
Tell us what the wheeling is like in your area?
In my direct area, there's nothing but ocean to the east and suburbs to the west. However, we're fairly spoilt in South East Queensland in that there is a whole bunch of 4x4 parks and legal National Park wheeling areas inside a 1.5-2hr drive.
What other toys/hobbies do you put a lot of time into?
I live a few hundred metres from the boat ramp in Manly (QLD) so my first love has always been the sea. I have a boat that I try to spend every weekend of good weather floating about in. My family also has property on Stradbroke Island so that is still my second home.
Oh, and I used to play with Holden V8's back in the day. Because that's what you did in the late 90's and 2000's.
Here I am sitting in one of my go-fast cars. The broken headlight was from the car in the lane next to me throwing a rod and it smashing my headlight. Duct-tape fixes everything! Lexan windows made this car pretty much a rolling oven.
Current boat stuff:
GV beach stuff:
What is it about the auszookers that brings you back for more?The depth of experience and the knowledge bank of ten years of the Suzuki hivemind; I still learn something new or a better way to do things every other day. I haven't been around as a member that long (comparatively) but when I first joined I found the banter and sarcastic insults between mates bloody funny when I first came here. It's still around, but it seems that the sensitivities of the Facebook World have diluted that a lot these days. People can be so easily offended these days, and in some ways that over-sensitivity leaks back to AZ on occasion which is a bit of a shame.
What about the auszookers forum would you like to see changed?
I would love to be able to 'ping' and/or tag other members in threads with an @henno type of notification. Some other existing forum software now has this function and it can be fairly handy, particularly when trying to engage users that can't or don't read every single thread every single day and you need to grab their attention.
Now for the million dollar question, who do you select to be the next Z.O.O.M. & why?
DMAC. His build is bloody great and he is a genuinely nice guy to boot.
