leaftye

I've been debating doing this for a while. I have a lot of work lined up, but it won't look much different for a long time. My goal is to be able to drive this out for camping trips for the rest of my life and drive it around town, which means it needs to be reliable and that fuel economy can't be hurt too much. That's basically what the XJ was made for, and I'm trying to make it a little better.

Here's how it looked when I picked it up.




Other than the bracket that holds the rear fender, the body appears to be completely free of rust. Some of the other parts have rust though, like that front bumper, wheels, driveshaft, and other parts that can be removed to get replaced or refreshed.

leaftye

When I bought it, it had 119k miles. It was in great shape, but I'm refreshing and upgrading everything now so that I can go another 100k miles or more without having to replace anything.

A couple months and 3k miles later, here's what it looks like. Almost exactly the same unless you look closely to see that the front bumper and wheels have had the rust repaired and painted, the missing wheel cap has been replaced, and that the plastics are now blacker.





What you can't see is that the headlight harness has been upgraded to support IPF housings and high watt bulbs. Because I wanted to take this up to the snow, I put in Rugged Ridge mats for the front seats, hi lift jack, Lift Mate, snow chains, 4 sets of snow chains. The windshield wipers have been replaced, Rotella T6 5W/40 and Mobil 1 filter, fixed a door pin that fell out and lubed all the hinges. The slip yoke and steering joints have been lubed as well.

Here's what's still wrong with it, at least visually.



Fender fell off. I still have it, but I need to get this bracket off. I may wait until I get a welder so that if I need to remove the studs I can weld on new bolts.




I'm going to repair or replace this. I could remove it, but I want to retain that OEM look as much as possible.





A replacement part is sitting in the garage.


I'm going to reinstall the license plate, but I need to find where my license plates screws are so I can replace the old rusty screws. I just moved, so my first mods too a loooooooong time because I needed to unpack things, organize and figure out where all my tools and parts were hiding.


There are lots of parts sitting in the garage waiting to get installed, and I'm in the process of ordering a lot of parts today. These won't change the look much until I get a set of 255/70R15 tires to put on the aluminum Wrangler wheels sitting in my garage, so I'll mostly post descriptions instead of pictures unless requested.