Only one lost wheelcover and one attempt on my life so far…

Posted on Dec 18, 2015 in Featured | 2 comments

While the AMX has occupied hallowed ground in one half of my garage since I bought my house, the other half has seen a rotating cast of assorted projects—an MG Midget, a Crosley, a mystery streamliner, an AMC Eagle station wagon—that might have kept our daily drivers out in the rain and snow but ultimately never panned out. My latest acquisition, though, appears to be a keeper, even if it has tried to kill me.

I wasn’t looking to take on another project, but rust has made my Grand Cherokee‘s days numbered. It’s all throughout the rockers and has forced me to replace the brake lines at least once a year for the past three years. It runs like a dream, so I’ve been cobbling together body parts to keep it decent and to stretch out its service years, but I know that one day I will literally run it into the ground, so I wanted to be prepared for when that day comes.

Searching locally for another Jeep—maybe an old CJ or a decent TJ—I came across this 1977 Jeep Wagoneer about an hour away from me. It seemed too good to be true; it had no significant rust, it ran and drove, it had the funkiest faded orange paint (Tawny Orange, as the color charts say), and it looked to be mostly there. Bonus, it was even in my price range. Like I said, normally, these things turn out to be too good to be true: You show up to look at the thing and discover all the rust that the seller neglected to mention, or the spitting carb or the total lack of brakes or the three flat tires. In this case, though, the worst of it seemed to be the front left fender (more on that in a moment) and three half-dollar-size rust spots in the rear quarters.

As the story goes, the original owner out in Idaho got into a fender bender with it sometime in the 1990s, so he gave it to a relative who then put another fender on (albeit from the wrong year) and kept it in a garage for the next 20 or so years. The guy selling it had it for a year, but never did anything with it, and needed the room. I couldn’t give him a deposit fast enough. He even offered to repair the rear quarter rust for me.

It’s by no means perfect. While it still has the original front and rear bench seats, the front needs a new cover, so for now the truck uses a pair of buckets out of a later Wagoneer. No carpet, and the headliner’s seen better days, but I’m digging the stripped-down bare-metal vibe for now. The carburetor on the 115,000-mile 360 needs either a rebuild or adjustment, with the Quadra-Trac it swills gasoline, and there’s about a hundred tiny little things to address, but that’s what you get with a project vehicle, right?

It made the drive home with no problems save for one: On a particularly rough stretch of frost-heaved road, one of the four original Jeep-logo wheelcovers decided to make a run for the hills. A subsequent search of that area turned up a million other wheelcovers and hubcaps, but not mine, so now I’m on the hunt for another. I’ve since driven it around town a bit to start getting a feel for it and what issues I need to address first.

As for the attempted murder charge? More my fault, really. I left it running and in neutral on what I thought to be a level patch of ground when parking it in the second hallowed spot in the garage the other day and suddenly found it nudging me from the rear in the garage. Fortunately, no harm was done to myself, the garage or the Wagoneer, affording me more days to do stupid things.