I got REALLY sick of looking at the nasty poo-tan interior in my '97 and I had some grey leather WJ seats sitting around taking up space, so I sought out some grey XJ guts and pieced it all together. Enjoy!

Before:



Pile of junk!


in progress!



Call me insane, but after living without carpet for a year, I wanted it back! I found a really nasty carpet in the junkyard, but after a LOT of steam cleaning and scrubbing it came out pretty decent aside from some slight discoloration and some cigarette burns, that is. I wish I would have taken before pictures of it... it was so gross I wouldn't even put it inside the jeep to drive home- I strapped it to the roof rack! The only reason I considered doing this was because the carpet hadn't started rotting yet, and I got it WITH the cool "Jeep" logo factory rubber mats for a whopping $10 versus about $250 for the carpet alone new.





As of now, the front seats are in but the back is not. Also, I need to get the headliner redone.

More later!!!
More later!

 

wow.. likin it....what did you pay for everything?

see I got the gray in mine, original '91....an want to replace all of it.. but thinking yes tan.....ha.

anyway, just curious what you paid and how many hours are you into it?

thanks!

cpnwrench

 

I paid about $85 for the interior plastics and $100-ish for the WJ seats. The carpet and floor mats as mentioned before cost $10 and about 4 hours of cleaning!

Why on earth would you ever want to do that?! lol... Actually, the tan interiors in the pre-'97 XJs were a lot nicer looking than the later ones... More of a "buckskin" than "butterscotch" if that makes any sense. The problem you'll run into on yours is the dash- On the '97-'01 you can simply replace the 2 end pieces, the glove box and the knee board under the column and viola! New color! On the '84-'96 you'll have to actually remove the whole dash and swap it with a different one. Also, the older dashes were made of the crack-prone padded material.

Removing the dash is a time consuming ordeal... here's mine half-removed for heater core/evaporator replacement:


Also, I'm into this project a whole lotta hours, but it could be done in a weekend. Most of my hours are involved in cleaning and locating the parts!

 

One last thing: If anyone is parting out a '97-'01 with this color interior, I need some parts! You can see the lighter gray pieces in the pics- they're a failed attempt at dying. They don't match and the dye is already flaking off. So, need the DS kick panel, DS inner rocker trim, PS cargo area panel, and rear hatch door panel...

 

Thank you sir for the feedback....

yeah I have taken the entire dash out before, just time consuming, not difficult.

in fact I have had the entire inerior out before, just to see wheres the rust and what its gonna take to put new floor pans in the front in.
(vent windows leakee leakee).. rusted floor pans.

anyway, thanks again for pics etc....gives me impetus and ideas.

cheers!

cpnwrench

 

Nip that rust in the bud, FAST! My previous Jeep was a '95 XJ that I spent many hours on cutting out rust, but the more I cut, the more I found. I had that Jeep a LONG time and it really hurt to part it out and junk it.

 

^ whats the big deal there, drop the fuel tanks and weld in some sheet metal. brand new rig. couple coats of paint and your in like flynn. have that rig for a lot longer.

 

And I definitely regret not doing so now! But really, this thing was rusted well up the firewall, front inner fenders, everything. Still, even with all that rust it was pretty damn solid! The paint still looked great and from the outside you couldn't even tell other than a few holes in the rockers. If I found a clean blue/silver '95 Country again, my woman would kill me!

In other ways though, I'm glad I did swap... The changes they made to the '97-'01 really made a difference!