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Transforming Basic Family Transportation into a Family Cruiser
This project started in Great Lakes, Illinois with the purchase of this 1990 Chevy Suburban. Since the rubber was dry rotted and worn, I drove it off the car lot and straight to Tires Plus for some new shoes.
I wanted wider tires but didn't have the cash for new rims so after playing with several sizes I chose to install P275/60R15s on the original rims.
Just as soon as I got the truck home, I took several photographs.
Then, I had to scan the photo into the computer and play with some ideas.
The goal is to take this attractive 1990 Suburban and transform it into the ultimate family cruiser. We had a sport truck approach in mind.
First thing to do is to remove as much chrome as possible.
So, I digitally removed the door handles, mirror, and miscellaneous emblems.
Then, I removed the running boards, that took a lot of work but made a very drastic improvement.
Next, I lowered the truck and cleaned up the photo. That took a lot of work too.
After that, I cleaned up the front of the truck and digitally removed the bug deflector. That was probably the hardest thing for me to accomplish and the end result is no where near perfect but . . .
The truck certainly looks great lowered doesn't it?
We plan to repaint the truck after the chrome is removed but will follow the stock two-tone paint scheme. The interior will remain mostly stock. We do plan to perform some mild upgrades to the stereo equipment as well as the overhead console and the floor console. Besides that, about all we'll do is replace the carpet and recover the seats.
Under the hood we'll add a dress up kit with aluminum components and lots of blue and silver paint. Other performance mods will include dual exhaust, a K&N filtercharger, Belltech 2/5 lowering suspension and shocks.
We don't want to mess with anything else just yet. This needs to remain a daily driver that is just plain cool. We need to be able to tow trailers and pick up the groceries in this thing so it won't receive any radical changes.
Then we moved to Hawaii . . .
Well here it is about a year later and as you can see, the running boards are gone as promised and we've put new wheels on the truck but little else has changed. The bug deflector was removed shortly after these photos were taken but the plans to lower the truck have gone to the wayside.
The new plan is to stay at the stock height and just stiffen up the springs and install a sway bar. We decided this after dragging bottom too many times driving cross country in Colorado at the current height. We figured dropping it would make the truck almost useless.
The tires that are on it are P275/60R15s on a set of 15x8 chrome blades. These tires are plenty wide enough but they are about an inch shorter than stock. We plan to change these to P285/60R16s to help fill the wheel well up a bit more and provide something very close to the stock height.
