Trailhawkmj

Things really slowed down with the xj disassembly. I'm taking my time and labeling all of the connections for everything and some of the wire connectors are hard to figure out how they come apart without breaking them. The interior is coming apart pretty decent. I managed to get most of the dash out with only breaking one clippy. Lots of poop and nests though. Nothing was chewed or broken, just filthy. It's only clean from the side molding up it seems. Lots of holes and the rockers are pretty gone Got the seats out and the carpet ripped up. Surprise, more holes! May'17: Worked on this about 10 hours today. Got a lot of stuff done but it almost looks the same as the earlier pics. On the comanche I took the front fenders off to see which brackets i need to keep from the cherokee. Wrestling with the flares and inner fenders took a while. On the xj side of things I pretty much have the entire interior stripped of everything I want now. I spent quite a while getting the dash brackets and seat mount rails free from their billion spot welds. The entire wiring is also out of the xj up to and including the taillights and 3rd brake light. I'm pretty much ready to reposition both of them on some pavement and snatch out the engines. I'm still not sure what I want to do about the doors. The one door is pretty trash from rust on the inside and outside all along the rocker. To fix it I would need to pretty much cut along the bottom edge of the door trim and replace that section with the bottom of a good door. The other door also has rust but it is mainly concentrated on the outside and not near as bad. I was going to pull the xj and mj doors apart and see if I could just put the xj guts and window into the mj frame but the interwebs says thats a no as the inside is different. It's slim pickings for any jeep parts locally but I might look into making a trip to a upullit yard or something. Got a little carried away with the angle grinder while cutting mounting templates from the donor firewall. Also took a few hunks of clean metal to use as patches in the mj for holes I will no longer be using. Mj cleaned up very nice with some degreaser and a brush. The motor mount frame horns just zipped right out

I really wanted to keep the stickers but they were just getting too rough for my taste. If I was just going to use this as a wheeler then they would have stayed. The camera really hides the marks once you get a few feet back. Disassembly will more than likely start this week. My first priority is going to be cleaning up the underside with a wire wheel and coating everything liberally with some rust preventative paint before crappy ole Pennsylvania ruins this. April '17: So this happened: Had to put the donut on. Not sure how long it's been since it has last seen the outside world but it only made it a few feet before it blew the bead and came off the rim :-\ Anywho, the reason I took the back tire off in the first place was because I swapped it with a flat tire on this: It's a 2001 with 149k on it. It's within like 200 miles of the comanche odometer.... what are the odds? It's pretty rough and rusty but it's mainly rough on the pieces I don't need. We had it running before purchase and it runs pretty solid. No knocks or taps. We'll see if that holds true once I change the oil on the chance that a PO put really thick stuff in it to hide noises. The interior is really dirty but under all of the dirt it is pretty nice. Nothing is torn, cracked or scraped. It just needs a solid cleaning. For what I ended up paying for it though I could basically just use the seats, fenders, and doors and come out ahead. A week later and the teardown has officially started. A few hours later and the only thing holding the engine in are the 2 motor mount bolts and 2 crossmember bolts. It's ready to be plucked once I put the hoist together and roll the truck near some pavement. Got some motivation and took the interior almost the whole way apart. I have 3 piles going. Save, sell, and scrap. Taking the cherokee apart will be a lot slower as I'll be labeling stuff and trying to keep all fasteners separate.

I've been lurking here for quite some time and have read through many of the great builds here. I finally picked up a mj of my own back in January and have been working on it pretty hard since the snow stopped. Most of the mj's around here in central PAare super rusty and require more work than I'm willing to deal with so I ended up buying a super clean one from Beasley in NC. He even made the 8 hour trip up here to deliver it! I'll be paraphrasing my build thread from over at jeepowner to get caught up here. January 17: I have wanted to get rid of my blazer for several years now and was planning on picking up a 99ish xj to replace it with. I've always had a plan of making the xj into a mild wheeler with a small lift and 31's. Every once in a while I'd stumble onto a comanche build and it would stir some plans up to get an mj instead. Mj's around here are pretty hard to find and near impossible to find rust free. After toying with the idea of combining an xj and an mj into the best of both, I decided to pull the trigger. I had the truck in my possession before I even had a game plan but the rust free blank slate was too good for me to pass up. The truck is an 88 sportruck, 2wd, 4cyl, 4spd. Since it was 2wd, it invoked the snow gods and I haven't been able to drive it or even work on it much yet since it got stuck in it's storage spot and then plowed in. March '17: After the snow melted the first order of business was to evaluate the areas of the mj that needed some work and decide which direction I would like to go with the parts from the xj. This involved a good cleaning to the interior, a refresh of the grill, and a removal of all the badges and stickers. Since the snow has finally melted, I've been using the truck as my dd for a little bit now. I've been using the seat time to get an idea of some mandatory changes that I want to make. Most of these changes will be made after I acquire an xj donor. Things like actual gauges and not idiot lights, automatic, bucket seats, power steering. All of those will come with the xj swap. I'm still undecided if the front clip will stay old school or update to the newer xj clip. I'm also still up in the air as far as paint color goes and if the stickers or some form of stickers will come back. As far as plans for the truck's running gear I'm aiming to swap the entire drivetrain from a 98 or 99xj. 4.0, aw4, 231, d30, 8.25. Along with the drivetrain I'm going to do the whole interior and dash swap. Underneath I'm still deciding on suspension. I have it narrowed down to a 3.5" lift all the way up to a 5.5" lift. 5.5 sounds pretty high for a DD and what not, but I blame some of the builds on comancheclub for steering me that way. I love how the 5.5ish lift looks with 31's to 33's which is what I'm aiming to run in the AT variety. I'm also planning on running some moab rims if I can find a set anywhere near here that is a reasonable price. This might be a slow build at first as I continue to try and source a decent xj donor but it should pickup (hah) once I have the donor and solidify my suspension choice and parts start trickling in. :)