Being brutal...... Buy a defender, and mess with that.
Before making such extreme mods though, you really ought to be asking, in big letters.....
WHY?
Lifting landies is trendy..... trouble is its done most often simply becouse 'thats what every-one does'.... without much thought for what lifting oine is actually doing.
First off, go up, go out. As you lift the chassis further from the floor, so you raise the Center of gravity, so to maintain the same base / height ratio you need to increase the track width to compensate to some degree for the added instability.
Series Landies have a 4" narrower track than a coiler, so are at a dissadvantage before you even begin; adding wheel-spacers and wider offset rims wont even get you the track a Deffy has as standard.
Next, lifting the suspension only puts more space under teh chassis. It improves the aproach and departure angles a little, and helps the break-out angle, but the axle clerance isn't any improved.
Meanwhile the raised CofG is giving you more dissadvantages as it is advantages. Look at comp-trials buggies, and they are kept pretty low; advantages of lower cofG for stability FAR outweigh the small advantages of extra clerance, in FAR more circumstances.
So, unless you have REALLY got to the point where you are out-driving your series, there is usually little real reason for going for a mega-lift, and IF you HAVE got to that point, then really you are better off looking at moving on to a coiler, rather than muggering about with the old series.
That nugget absorbed; PRACTICALLY, for a little more capability, best things to do to a leafer are fit bigger ytres/ wheels. 235/85R16's on wider offset eight-spoke or modular wheels work well, but any 32" tyre would do, really, and that's about as big as you can practically go without more convoluted mods.
After that, parabolics give ABOUT a 2" lift, on top of the 1.5" you'll have gained from bigger wheels, which will be most usefully under the diff-pan.
If you want to go to tha 'max' after that, then with a LOT of thought and consideration, and more than a little crafting and fabrication, you can go to 'One-Ton' sping hangers and extended shackles, which with wider angle props and corrected steering arms, will give you about another 2" of lift, and on THAT
you can run 900 or 37" tyres, that give you about another 2.5" of lift, again, most usefully under the axle
BUT at that tyre size, steering lock is starting to get severely limited while advantages of added articulation are deminished by the tyres fouling on the chassis before you reach it...... more reason for spacers and wide offset rims...... but again, still no where near as much extra track or clerance as you'd get from a standard coiler.......
Basically anything can be done, but going MUCH beyond 32" rubber and paras on a leafer, and you are into the realms where the gains dont REALLY warrant the effort, and you'd be FAR better messing with a coiler.....
That IS of course if you are actually going down the right path to begin with, and the mods are actually worth-while, in finding you 'real' improvements where you are pushing the car into places that are really beyond its capability......
Pretty amazing where you can actually get a standard leafer, and time and again well driven old series humble fully equipped 'extreme' coilers on events and at P&P's.
And my advice for a leafer is always leave it as close as possible to standard, and use it as a training tool. WHEN you start getting stuck becouse the car GENUINELY has run out of capability, rather than you have done something daft, THEN you might start looking for mild mods, or a coiler...... for which the same advice applies..... and when you start getting THAT stuck purely becouse its lacking ability, rather than a daft driver, THEN you might start looking at mods and whether the pro's and cons of them are worth it..........
Leafers are great devices, and for years, while coilers were too expensive to be messed with, modding them made some kind of sense, unfortunately these days, with many more cheaper more easily messed with 90's about, the limitations inherent in a leafer REALLY dont make them a good choice to do all that much to.
The coilers have much more capability as standard, can be taken much further, more easily beyond standard, and are far better supported by way of bits to do it all with.
It's REALLY not worth mucking about with leafers to that degree any more. Hence why the Rangie or Disco based 'Hybrid' has become the defacto tool for competition.
