The Tarantula: All Off-Road’s Teraflex Jeep

We’ve all been there: in the camping store, accessories department, or fitment centre. Our eyes roam over countless shiny new parts while our imaginations run wild. We try to convince ourselves that these material items don’t make us happier… but that’d be lying to our true greedy selves. Unfortunately, as much as our minds race and hearts skip a beat, our wallets most often stay sullen. So, where does it end? Well, it ends here, with the TeraFlex Jeep.

What Pierre Smit and the guys from SA Procurement/All Off-Road have done is to build what in their minds is the ultimate toy – a full-sized Tonka fitted only with the best. SA Procurement is a logistics and procurement company which, in this case, has imported the parts for the All Off-Road Jeep we see here. These guys are agents for the Factor 55 and TeraFlex brands, so almost all the parts fitted here come from the USA’s massive cache of aftermarket support for Wranglers that is now filtering through to SA.

This particular Wrangler was actually bought as a write-off from an insurance company after hot oil dripped on the exhaust and set fire to the gearbox and transfer case, along with the some of the wiring loom.  The fact that the JK was already trashed meant that All Off Road could start on a clean sheet of canvas after the vitals were sorted.

Apart from the gargantuan 40-inch Cooper tyres, possibly the Jeep’s most striking feature is its ‘JK Truck Conversion Kit’. A fibreglass body completely replaces the rear end and doors, which not only gives the Jeep a mean look, but adds practicality if you need to chuck an MX bike in the back. The kit is manufactured in the USA and includes a tinted rear window and all the seals necessary to make it fit as well as every other factory panel.

It’s rather comedic to drive a Jeep as kitted as this on a regular 4×4 trail. With the tyres deflated to 0.6 bar and the sway bar disconnected, the Jeep crawls over boulders like a tarantula on steroids – no diff locks needed.

Underneath the beast is where the true magic happens. The Teraflex damping components feature remote reservoirs and are adjustable for preload, compression and rebound. The immense flex comes from a 6-inch JK long-arm kit and adjustable track bars front and rear, offering nearly a metre of suspension travel at each corner. Because of the wheel offset and such large tyres, the Jeep will occasionally eat its own mud flaps, but luckily most of the plastic bits are quick-release jobs – no detail has been missed.

Though this mad JK is about as far gone as modified Jeeps get, there are plans in the pipeline to fit a Ripp supercharger to the standard four-litre V6 petrol, as well as more negative offset beadlock wheels to reduce rubbing. The stock Dana 44 Rubicon axles will be braced or even upgraded in the future, but even until then, this may be the most kitted Jeep Wrangler in all of South Africa.