Our Zuki History

This page is a "work in progress." Eventually we'll add photos and more narrative. For now, I'd like to recap our Zuki history.

Charlie Ester got us hooked on Zukis back in early 1999. We started looking for one in March of that year. It took until August to find the right one down in Peoria. We bought it sight unseen over the phone at 6:30 am. We paid $1950 for it. It was a 1987 Special Edition cream puff with an aftermarket hardtop.

By and by, time passed and we put up notices on bulletin boards all over The Verde. Some guy saw out 3 by 5 card in Fry's and sold us a nice 1988 tintop for $1350. It has a weak engine but the body was a real "looker."

More time passed and we got a chance to buy a nice rollover rig. The seller even trailered it out to our house. I think we paid $200 including delivery. It had mass quantities of great parts. We picked at that thing for years and finally sold in in 2006 for $200.

We parted with the tintop in 2006, too, getting $2500 out of it.

We towed our original '87 all over the West until 2006. That's when we parked it in Cornville each summer and finally sold it to Eric B. at Dead Horse State Park in the summer of 2007. We threw in a lot of parts we wish we had now.

In early 2009, we got smitten by Zukis again up in Idaho Falls and jumped a little too fast on one for $950. We should have known better. It needed a transfer case really bad. Luckily, Eric gave us the t-case we had sold to him and we swapped it out with no problem. We sold that one for $1350 and then got a 1991 Suzuki Sidekick for $400. We eventually sold that one for $800 in October 2010.

We watched all of the ads across a three-state area looking for another good stocker. We found one in early September 2010 down south of Provo, Utah. We drove 535 miles round trip that day to pick it up. We paid $1950 for it. The seller wasn't telling the truth about several aspects of the Sammi. It's still worth what we paid but we should have been a little more cautious on that one. This blog documents everything we've done to it so far. the trouble with it is that the body is great and the interior has been completely redone. We don't want to take it out and beat it up because it's a "town car," a real head-turner. It's probably the nicest stock Zuki in Idaho Falls, if not all of Eastern Idaho.

Our sixth Suzuki popped up on Christmas Day in Maricopa, Arizona, a BFE place in Pinal County south of the Gila River Indian Reservation. The seller didn't return our phone calls so we gave up on it. We happened to be in Litchfield Park on December 27 to buy a pop-top camper for our pickup. The seller called us and we were able to go down to Maricopa, buy it for $2000 and skee-daddle back to Dimrock by 7 pm!

We're only in the beginning phases of messing with the latest one. My wife Susun names every vehicle and Zukis are no exception. This one is called SuziQ. One of the reasons for that name is so we can use the famous Credence Clearwater Revival tune as the Zuk's theme song. We're pretty sure SuziQ is a keeper but we won't know for certain for awhile yet. I want to check the compression and a bunch of other stuff first. We are thinking we might put as much as $1000 more into it. The jury's still out on that one.

We've had a lot of fun with various other Zuki owners, especially Suzuki Bob in Tempe. We don't have time to tell all those stories right now but we will soon.