A lot has happened

I went almost a month between my last two posts. Hopefully that won’t happen again (although I’m two sentences in to this and have already had to stop a half dozen times to deal with either the tactical dog or lilwizard, or both).

Mostly I’ve been chasing down a problem at work that had a June 1st deadline for resolution or it’ll cost us several million dollars. I love you guys, but you don’t buy my groceries.

I sold the WRX and bought this:

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s my third Cherokee, not counting the three my dad had when I was growing up. I pretty much started looking for one again about the time the guy who bought my last one rounded to corner out of sight. At the time, I needed the extra money more than I needed a third vehicle, especially since my daily driver was a 4×4 Excursion.

I’d been hardcore looking for one for about 8 months. I really wanted one withe the NP242 (Selec-Trac) transfer case, but about six months in to my search I had seen exactly one for sale within a hundred miles of here, and it sold before I could get to the guy and buy it. It was a 92 XJ Wagoneer, for those who know what that is. So I resigned myself to buying one with the NP231 and doing a swap.

Well I finally got tired of being treated like a 17 year old while driving the WRX so I put it up on craigslist. Basically, within 90 seconds I had two soccer moms SCREAMING at me for going too fast–first in a parking lot where I was backing out of a parking spot and then again while sitting at a stoplight not moving at all. So I started remembering all the times where the crossing guard on my way to work would wave for me to slow down when I was 30 ft from the guy in front of me and all the times I’d been pushed into oncoming traffic by merging minivans who either didn’t see me or didn’t care.

It sold in about a week.

On Sunday a couple came and looked at it. Sunday night they let me know they’d be coming by Monday evening to pay me and pick it up. Monday morning on my way to work I said to myself, “Self, if you see that Cherokee you’ve been admiring for the last year today, and you can turn around and follow the guy to his office, you should see if he’ll sell it to you.”

So that happened.

The previous owner had done just about everything I would have wanted to do to any XJ that I picked up, and hadn’t done any mods that I would not have done. The only thing wrong with it was a bad driver window regulator and some flaky wiring (ON A JEEP? YOU’RE KIDDING!) in the rear hatch, both of which I fixed on the first weekend. It does have the 231 so I want to do a swap but I need to wait until I get another vehicle to do that. See, doing that with 3″ of lift may cost a mere $200 for just the transfer case, or it may cost upwards of $2000 for the case, axle shims, and a new driveshaft with a slip yoke eliminator. You don’t know which it’ll be until you replace the transfer case and then get it on the interstate. If there are vibrations, you have to send off the output shaft to get it machined. So that’s going to wait a little bit.

Next week I’m picking up these bumpers locally.

Also, I’ve had it for a couple of weeks now and even though I really liked the way the rims and tires looked on it, I may replace them with Cragar Soft D‘s and some BridgeStone Dueller’s. We’ll see.