MHughey

Hey guys!

I'm Mark from Conway Arkansas and I own a 94 2 door Cherokee with 175K miles. I bought it a little less than a year ago for my 18th birthday (dad and I split the cost) and it was a HUGE upgrade from the 89 Isuzu Trooper I was driving with its little 4 banger! I'm a college student with a college student budget so I'm looking forward to hearing about some budget builds here one the site! I just got down three days ago installing a 2" lift on my xj and I conquered the infamous death wobble yesterday with an alignment! I love my Jeep and I love working on it, which drives dad crazy cuz I take up the driveway and garage with my projects. My next big investment in my Jeep is new tires. My current tires came with my Jeep, 235LT 75 R15 Duelers, and my front tires are now racing slicks and the rears are going to be there in about a month. Dad's helping me out for my birthday in getting 30x9.5 R15 BF Goodrich All Terrains. I was going to go with something more aggressive but my xj is going to be my DD until I graduate (Dad and I have a deal where if he doesn't have to pay for my college, he'll get me a 2011 Mustang GT! ).

The most recent problem I'm having with my Xj is something I checked for when I bought the vehicle, but didn't catch until I was installing my lift. When I was looking for an Xj, I noticed about 3 out of 4 we looked at had some of the WORST rust problems I've seen on any vehicle. They were always right underneath the driver and passenger's seats on the outer edge of the frame. Dad and I developed a little method to test for rust as we were out looking around at Xj's. We took a long screw driver and would poke the areas we knew commonly rusted and if the screw driver went through or was destroying the metal in front of our eyes we would just leave and go onto the next one. Well our search for an unrusty Xj led us to a used car dealer in Kansas City of all places. We found a super super super clean 94 2 door Xj for an amazing price! We performed our check and everything seemed to be fine, in fact, it almost seemed to clean on the bottom. We took some extra time knocking and poking and behold... no rust. I do remember however dad pointing out to me how clean and black the underside seemed to be and how it seemed rather fishy. Well about a year later I'm out here in my drive way and what do you know! I'm knocking around underneath putting on my lift and tons of black crappy bedliner comes crackling off along the frame and underbody. I begin to chip and chip and I start to uncover rust spot after rust spot. The jerks at the used car dealer had taken some bondo or some other filler and super thin sheet metal and some how glued it over the spots and holes. I started doing some rust repair by spraying down the rust with some phosphoric acid and cleaning it and grinding away the nasty crap and then spraying the not so bad spots with bed liner after it had an acid bath to reverse the oxidation. Now I have some holes to deal with though. theres 5 that i've found that vary in size. 3 are very very tiny and I can fix those myself with some sheet metal and my buddy's welding equipment, but 2 are at some funky angles and one is right over my rear leaf spring mounting tab. I was pretty down yesterday because the guy at the shop that did my alignment said there was nothing that could be done for the two angled areas with holes. I took it to a body shop and the technician looked at it and gave me about the same response. He said it would take a lot of fabrication and time to make metal patches to fit the areas that were rusted and that it would be to expensive. I decided after that not to let it get to me until I took it to a couple more shops and get some real estimates but it is a pretty big bummer...

Anyway, that's my intro rant! Sorry if I took up to much space! lol

Mark Jr

91 limited owner

Welcome, from Wisconsin.

ol"blue

azxj99

Welcome from the heat of arizona