spaceharrier

1989 Jeep Cherokee XJ
4x4, auto trans
~208,000 miles
Just smogged (08/16) and ready to go
Registered to Feb 2017

$1,000 or best offer






General condition: Ridden hard and put away wet. If you’ve been struggling with excessive social standing, this vehicle can help.

Paint: Manages to get away with a less than most cars. What there is was applied with rattle cans in a driveway. Which makes for easy and cheap touch up work. The rear liftgate paint is fine, because the whole rear liftgate came from another XJ. It’s bright red. The combo of flat black and red is very easy to spot in a crowded parking lot. That’s an important talking point for your date.

Interior: Stripped of carpet in the load space. POR-15 over the rusty bits on the floor panels, and poorly cut sheeting held by even more poorly applied rivets hiding the places I saw daylight. Sealant on the underside and Herculiner on top. There’s a new-ish carpet in front which is carefully cut not to fit. Weathertech floor mats sit on top of it trying to hide the awful installation. Between front and rear is a Raingler cargo net. The headliner is a patchwork of Ensolite after the original rotted and sagged. It’s set off by a jaunty outbreak of blue painters tape holding up wires. Rear seats have been removed to increase the load space. Features electric windows of course, because you baller.

Windshield: Cracked.

Engine: 4.0, Renix ECU. Sale includes a Snap-On MT2500 diagnostic computer with appropriate connectors and cartridges to interface to the ECU. Recall: this engine is computer controlled. Bruce Boxleitner is probably running around in there trying to fix the fuel mixture right now.

4x4: NP231 Part Time 4WD. Front and rear driveshafts have under 5K miles on them, and rear is a custom job with zerk fittings for greasing and u-joint. So you might be able to get rid of the transfer case drop without everything getting wobbly, but I haven’t tried. 4WD works just fine, and is engaged with a satisfying yank on a floor-mounted lever. No silly light-up electric selectors.

Suspension: Old Man Emu 2.5” lift, regular duty, about 15K miles. Surprisingly comfortable, and upgrades the handling from terrifyingly abstract to merely bad.

Tires: General Grabber AT2, rated for severe snow. Plenty of tread left, except at the front right where the alignment wanders like a creepy glass eye. ‘Spare’ has a slow leak, the cause of which is undiagnosed.

Economy: Think 2008. Gets about 18 mpg, coasting downhill on its birthday.

Performance: It’ll cruise at 70 mph. I won’t say ‘happily’, because we’re not in a happy place here, but it’ll do it. If the temperature is above 70F or the vehicle is more than modestly loaded, hyperspace only be maintained for a short time before the engine gets hot. New radiator might help, but who knows. There’s a manual switch for the supplemental electric fan so you can get out ahead of that when crawling, be in it Bay Area traffic or along a trail.

Bumpers (etc.): Incongruously good JCR front and rear metal bumpers, and heavy duty JCR rock sliders to match, which double as steps. All black powder coated. Totally worth more than the rest of the vehicle. The bumpers have kick-*** LED fog and backup lights, and are tucked in enough to significantly improve approach and departure angles.

Stereo: Goes some way to helping you forget what you have done. Alpine CDE-153BT head unit, KTP-445U amplifier, Type-S speakers (and four of them at that). Behind the passenger seat, a JBL subwoofer with onboard amp to round things out. This is the part that gives you a fleeting, worthless hope of convincing your friends you were not insane for buying this car. It also sounds way better than you would expect the stereo in this thing to sound.

Air conditioning: This blows much cooler than the heater, and could generously be described as “sort of cold”. That’s something I’m especially pleased with having had the system rebuilt front-to-back less than a year ago at eye-watering expense. Anyway, it’s nice to have, though not if you’re somewhere especially hot and really need it, because under those circumstances running it may lead to the engine overheating.

Other cool stuff: it has a Viper alarm. The alarm piece isn’t wired up because alarms are annoying, and I got bored of trying to figure out why the power door locks stopped working, but stop they did and you’ll need to use the key, just like grandma. On the other hand the Viper does provide a remote start capability, which never gets old on a vehicle like this. Many (many) of the tedious bits of running gear -- ball joints etc. -- and engine sensor parts -- fuel pressure regulator, egr valve etc. -- have been replaced with new MOPAR parts. There’s also a Battery Tender solar panel trying gamely to keep the battery from discharging while idle. A lot of heavy-duty grounding upgrades. Thule roof bars are on it, and even have locks for which I think I might have the key. Just passed smog, which is nice because the cat and entire exhaust system is about 18 months old.

Why buy it: because you can go places where prettier ones won't, nobody will want to play chicken with you in the merge lane, and you just won’t give a s**t about all the things that people with shiny new cars worry about.

If you can see yourself captaining this Keith Richards of Cherokees, drop me a line.

spaceharrier

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