Buying spares for stockpiling
This is really just a page for a collection of thoughts that I have about spares to potentially stockpile for having your Jimny off the road less often, especially if you do a lot of 4wding. Many of these will include suggestions for buying used parts and where you might want to source them from. Often, keeping your eyes peeled for savvy bargains in used rare parts can be the best way to keep a 4wd going long term no matter what the world throws at you.
Parts stockpiling thoughts
General service parts
I think you should always have a couple of service items handy. Suzuki having the genuine service kits available at a reasonable price is good. Whenever I do a service using these items, rather than needing to buy it and wait for availability to do the service, I do the service and then stock back up.
I always keep a couple of service kits handy for starters. I keep both a minor (99999-SER22-A01: service kit A, oil filter and sump plug washer) along with a major service kit (99999-SER55-BS1: service kit B, contains same as kit A but also air filter, cabin filter, spark plugs & valve cover gasket). On top of that, I change my air filter a lot more frequently when doing dusty tracks so keep another one of those spare, and a spare extra cabin filter.
The automatic Jimnys are pretty prone to fluid contamination and the ‘filter’ in the automatic transmission is just a fairly basic mesh screen, not a full paper filter. Keep a pan gasket and a spare filter assembly for the transmission. You don’t need a new filter each time, they can be cleaned, but it’s a lot easier if you have a spare filter & o-ring for it to hand. Take the current one out, replace it with your spare one using a new o-ring, and put the pan on with a new gasket. Clean the current one and that’s your new spare, ready to go next time you do an auto transmission service.
Another item that is good to keep spares of are relevant drain and fill plug washers for the differentials. This reduces friction on changing the oil: buy a bunch in bulk and keep them in your toolbox and you’re never caught short. It’s a lot cheaper per washer if you do this rather than buying them individually whenever you want to do a driveline service. I do the same with oil, too: buy it when it’s on special, then use what’s in stock when I need it & stock back up when things come on sale.
Wheel bearings & axles
Rears in particular cop a hiding in a SWB 4wd and they’re best off being assumed to be a consumable part if you do any significant amounts of mud driving or deep water crossings. I keep at least two handy at all times: this includes the axle seal protector, the axle seal, the bearing itself & the retainer. If I need to do one then I can pull those off the shelf, and stock up again once I need it. Suddenly a ‘oh no, the axle is leaking, I need to do the rear wheel bearings’ job that involves a 2 week wait for parts becomes something you can do in an hour after work.
If you do a huge amount of mud driving and are doing wheel bearings regularly enough to get good at doing it, it’s worth investing in a spare set of axles. Rears are not expensive (all things considered). Just keep them nicely sealed up in anti-corrosion paper with new bearings on them. When you next need to do a wheel bearing change, just pop the old axle out, pop the new one in. You’re then free to strip the old axle down at your leisure and change the rear wheel bearing rather than rushing to do it at 10 pm at night before you’re off on a cross-country adventure on the next day.
Front wheel bearings are less common to do, but I do keep a couple handy along with front suspension rebuild components. Better to be looking at them rather than looking for them…
Front wheel bearings do not need to be kept on the axle, but speaking of front axles a set of front axles can be worth chasing down when you can find them cheap. The CV joints come from the factory as a complete half shaft and they are prohibitively expensive as a new genuine part from a dealership. While not common to do them, if you’re keeping the car for lots of km or you do a lot of mud driving then you may well end up needing them at some point. The alternative here is sourcing an entire front axle assembly off a wreck but they are pricey, especially if you have to freight them.
Suspension components
I actually keep very few suspension components in stock, purely as things like bushes or shock absorbers are slower failures you can monitor and sort out preemptively. The main thing I have a spare set of are things involved in a swivel-hub rebuild: seals, kingpins, and kingpin bearings. I also have a little set of a few kingpin shims in a couple of sizes. This means if something comes up and I don’t have the few hours to set aside to rebuilding the swivel hubs due to worn kingpin bearings I can just pop a kingpin, shim it, put the kingpin back and do another one. Doing them one at a time and it is a very fast job.
While a lot of people keep stock suspension springs and shocks after upgrading, I threw mine out pretty quickly. If you do swap from one lift kit to another, it can be worth (if you have the space) to keep the first lift kit as a set of spares. Gives you some way to drive the car around for a couple of weeks while a replacement shock or spring comes in, basically.
It can be a good idea to have suspension bolts handy if you’re doing some big trip. You probably won’t lose them all (especially if you monitor their health on a daily basis, in particular when doing corrugations). You may, however, lose some, so at least a spare of each type of bolt/nut is worthwhile. Upper rear shock mount bolts definitely like to go missing, and I’ve seen a couple of radius arm to differential bolts go loose over time and flog out the thread on the axle.
Wheel speed sensors
Here’s something I’d grab if you can find it cheap from a wreck. Fronts in particular seem to get broken quite a bit, usually from people not accommodating the additional droop with upgrading the suspension. The challenge is that the actual sensor is integrated into the wiring and left and right for either the front or the rear are also integrated together. If you break one wire and you aren’t able to locate the break and fix the wiring, then you need to replace both sensors and all of the wiring all the way up into the engine bay.
Each axle end retails for ~$300 or so, though you can find them for around $200 new online if you’re lucky. If you can find them from a wreck where they are probably good then it might be worth the gamble if you can get them cheaper than this. It isn’t a spare I would bother taking on a trip with me offroad: if it doesn’t work then basically all you’ll lose is traction control and/or ABS, but I think you’ll still have the other axle’s brake traction control working still. It’s just something to have so if something gets snagged or you break the wiring then you can fix it once you get home.
Electrical components
A few things to think about for spares here:
- Alternators
- Main battery terminal including high-current fuses
- Fuses plus relays
Working backwards through that list, fuses go without question: have some of the mini blade fuses to hand at all times to replace any fuses that happen to get taken out in the interior fuse panel. What’s often not thought about are the higher current fuses in the engine bay fuse compartment and the relays there. I’d keep a spare relay or two and a couple of the fuses for the engine bay fuses to make sure you can make it home should something catastrophic happen.
Speaking of fuses, what is often less considered is the main positive battery terminal. This incorporates the main fuses for the car and if you blow these then you’re in for much more of a world of hurt. People have incorrectly wired winches to pull through these fuses and then you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere with a very electrically dead car. While you can fashion an aluminium can to make a temporary fuse, this isn’t ideal for obvious reasons. If I was going somewhere relatively remote then I would absolutely grab a spare positive battery terminal and throw it into the spares box. You don’t have to buy them from a Jimny, a number of other cars use them and you can pull out the existing wiring to fit it to the terminals in the positive battery terminal if you have to swap it over.
The final thing I think anyone who does any degree of offroading in the Jimny where mud or water is involved is a spare alternator. You don’t have to buy them for the Jimny, they come on a few other Suzukis too, but, they’re a very good spare to have to hand. Complete ones can be bought for as cheap as $40 from wrecking yards. If space is an issue, usually the main point of failure that’ll hurt you offroad are the brushes getting pushed back and held back; sometimes mud also accelerates their wear so at least keeping a set of the brushes to hand is useful. The alternator rotor is also useful, though opening up the front of the alternator can be hard in an offroad situation so a full replacement is easier if you have a bearing or rotor failure. Brushes at least can be done insitu, though a little painful so easier to remove the alternator from the car unless you’re very practised at it.
Steering components
The big one here to consider is the steering box. They aren’t rebuildable and they will, eventually, develop wear in the middle which leads to excessive steering play. While they can be adjusted to take that up, at some point they end up too tight on the ends of the travel. Since they are not a common item in most cars there’s not a huge amount of support for remanufacturing steering boxes like the Jimny uses, and they are expensive to buy new (~$1300 retail).
Since the gen4 Jimnys do their power assistance for the steering via a powered steering column, it looks like the steering boxes are shared with late gen2 coil sprung cars and/or early gen3 non power steering cars. The part number cast into the body of the steering box is 48600-81A0, shared with older model cars. The official gen4 part number 48600-78R00 doesn’t indicate revisions, but some parts listings have it as 48600-81A40 i.e. there’s probably some revisions subsequent to initial introduction in the 1990s.
If you’re planning on 200,000 km+ on your car and would like it steering nicely for those km, I’d be looking for a steering box from a low km rear end damaged wreck while they are plentiful. If you have a much earlier Sierra or Jimny without power steering then it also could be worth investigating to replace your old and worn steering box with a fresh one from a gen4 wreck.
Brake components
If you do a lot of mud driving, I would seriously consider finding a 2nd set of brake calipers for the front. This isn’t much more expensive than buying components to rebuild calipers & brake pistons plus caliper slides can really cop a hiding.
I almost always try to have a set of front brake pads, rear brake shoes, and relevant single-use items (e.g. brake shoe handbrake lever clips) on hand.
LED headlights & fog lights
Here’s a thing people don’t often consider. If you have a Jimny with LED headlights and you do a lot of driving where rocks might get flicked up then it can be worthwhile sourcing spares. The LED headlights are complete units, so breakages or failures require total replacement.
With an RRP of $1200 Australian per light at the time of writing, finding a used one can be good. I bought one cheaply in Australia before people realised how expensive they were; my other side is sourced from Yahoo Japan.
While cheaper, if you like the look of a stock car then spare fog light/DRL assemblies are worth grabbing if you can get on one. Sometimes people upgrade these to aftermarket lights and they sell the originals cheaply. If that’s the case and you like the idea of keeping the car stock then buy a spare pair and keep them on a shelf. Aftermarket ones existing does reduce the need to do this though.
Seat foam and/or fabric
The drivers seat in particular in the Jimny does tend to wear down over time. Often, especially with lifted cars, people drag themselves into the car across the seat bolsters and this crushes them. A spare seat pad and seat backing foam can be good to have. Seat fabric can be worth getting if you don’t run seat covers; in many parts of Australia any tear in seat fabric (even if you have covers!) is something you can fail a roadworthy on.
Fuel pump and/or pump hanger
A big Achilles heel of any fuel injected car is the fuel pump. Suzuki themselves will only tell you that you have to buy the entire fuel pump hanger that drops into the tank; officially they do not list a separate fuel pump. While there are routes to buying genuine kits of fuel pumps, at this stage the best option is to find a cheap used hanger from a wreck with low km and keep that on the shelf.
Quite often fuel pump deaths can be instantaneous and without warning. Having one to hand in stock at home makes it a lot easier: get the car home, drop the tank, put a new hanger in it, sorted.
Ignition coils
This probably depends how deep your pocket is, but I wouldn’t worry about these till we’re getting to the 10 year old/160,000 km age for a car based on how most coils last. They don’t seem to be prone to premature failure in the Jimny. If I was doing a very long road trip offroad I might buy one as a spare: if you develop a misfire and get a check engine light from it, you can swap coil positions to diagnose which cylinder it is. If the misfire follows the coil then you can replace that coil with your spare and be up and running.
It is very rare that all 4 ignition coils would fail simultaneously. That said, with sufficiently deep pockets, and wanting to keep the car very long term, then I’d just get 4. When one fails, then you can just replace all 4 at home. Once you verify which one is the bad one, mark this one and keep the other known good ones as spares at this point. Probably 1 set of replacements will last you through to the life of the engine, effectively.
Transmissions & transfer case
This one is a bit more speculative, but, if I was trying to keep an auto working with hard offroad work and wanting to get lots of km out of it then it might be a good time to buy a used transmission from a wreck. Gen3 automatics have become scarce from wrecks and seemingly they are not easily rebuilt with many components no longer available. A low km spare transmission can be a sensible thing if you have the capital to buy one; otherwise, it might be good to stock up on rebuilding parts like many of the internal clutch packs.
For a manual, stockpiling a shift linkage set (potentially with fresh bushes) is sensible. They are prone to mud and water ingress offroad; when the linkage bushes wear then you can end up with quite sloppy shifting too. Given the cost of the bushes involved it could be beneficial to buy the complete shifter control rod assembly rather than refreshing your one, though the bushes into the top of the gearbox also benefit from being rebuilt.
Transfer case chains can and do stretch, and sometimes you can get lucky buying OEM replacements at discounted prices from some of the parts suppliers. I also got lucky at a wreckers and got a transfer case relatively cheaply (~$650 including freight) which is useful to have as a spare to swap in should I need to do anything to mine.
Pro tips on finding bargains
- If buying OEM parts, consider using places like 4wdpartshop or Partsouq to get things.
If you’re doing something like this then maximise your orders, too. Buying a few parts you need now(ish)? Throw in some random spare bolts, o-rings, or gaskets or similar. If it doesn’t make the postage huge then it’s worthwhile. This is especially true if it lines up with discounts or parts being more available.
A practical example of this: Pretty much any time I am doing an order I will throw in a set of bits for a rear wheel bearing. Doing this then lets me help out people if they need something immediately but also means I have at least 2 sets (i.e. both sides) ‘in stock’ at home for my own needs, too. - Expand your search to include ways wrecking yards list parts, and/or commonly misspelled words
In terms of wrecking yards, many will use official model naming as that’s what comes up in their parts inventory systems. Look for “GJ Jimny” or just A6G415 for the model code (JJ Jimny or A6N415 for a 5 door).
When it comes to misspelling Jimney is super common; I’ve got a few parts cheap that noone was buying because they were for a Jimney (e.g. “Jimney fuel pump”) and ebay didn’t find it under regular searches. - Go overseas for used part searches
Don’t just restrict yourself to, say, FB Marketplace, Australian Jimny groups or ebay. A lot of my spares are searching just on part number on places like Yahoo Japan auctions or Amazon Japan. Not all sellers will ship internationally so you need to use an export agent/parts forwarding agent, but there can be significant savings to be had here.
There can be some traps here, sometimes the auto-translate doesn’t work particularly well. In those examples you might need to do some digging to find a listing that’s like what you’re after and find some key native language keywords and go from there, e.g. “トランスミッション” to find transmissions works better than the auto-translate “伝染” or “感染” or “ギアボックス” for gearbox. - Cross-fitting parts
I do my best to illustrate this but for certain things (e.g. alternators) just search on the specific part number, not restricting yourself to Jimnys. Once you find what other models a part fits on then use this to expand your search. Spare alternators for me are cheapest if bought for a K12C Swift or Ignis; they’re the same as a Jimny alternator but way, way cheaper.
Not everything cross-fits between 3 and 5 doors but familiarising yourself with things that might can help a lot too. Sometimes parts are a lot cheaper with a Maruti sourced version of the same part. Understanding part systematics is something I cover in my buying parts article. The key is to keep that in your mind when you’re looking for parts & search for both Suzuki Japan and Maruti Suzuki sourced parts where they’ll work for you.