Minuit

Normal. My 91 currently has a chrome, powered passenger side mirror and a black, manual driver side mirror. It's also missing the passenger side kick panel due to a secret project I haven't felt like working on yet.

I thought for sure that the BAT comment section would be full of people pointing out the clear flaws, but color me surprised. One or two comments about the obvious odometer fraud but everyone else blabbing about how great the Jeeps they used to own were. Somebody's really gonna spend several thousand bucks on this truck. I wish them well, but I expect whoever ends up with it will regret it once they get their own eyes on it and have to live with it for a while. I hope at least someone finds this thread BEFORE they make a bid and decide accordingly, not right after money changes hands. As a side note, the listings were written by BAT's own staff as of a couple of years ago, not the seller. I don't know if that has changed recently, but as far as I know they are still being written by someone who has probably never even seen the truck in person and is not specifically familiar with the make or model in question. If you look at something on there you're familiar with, you'll often see little incorrect things in the listings, so my warning to anyone in general is to take the descriptions of the truck in BAT listings with a grain of salt. If this thing goes high, that's more good news on the "MJs increasing in value" front though. As much as I'd rather see a high quality example sell for big bucks rather than a mediocre one with some serious red flags.

I would be really suspicious of this, unless Key Parts has decided to step into the injection molding game. They sell rust repair panels and other metal items almost exclusively. They're at least one of the vendors for the good black XJ floor pans that are also a pretty good fit for the MJ. I don't know if they make anything, but their site leans toward "no" and the aforementioned XJ floor pan I bought from them had a different manufacturer label than "Key Parts" on the box. As a side note, one of the "new parts" that scrolled by as I was looking around on their site was a full floor pan for a YJ - exactly the same idea as the Mopar replacement pans and just like that full NOS floor stamping Adam posted a while ago.

The whole truck was yellow and black at one point. The bed was damaged when the PO bought it and shortly before I bought it it got smashed into a guard rail and the front clip was replaced.

This dumpster fire?

If I have to notice it every time I look at those wheels for the rest of my life, so does everyone else

You haven't told us what year. That matters. On most models, radio memory is on the DOME fuse. Center pin of 1988+ plug, typically a pink wire. You should see 12V at all times. AMC radios wouldn't be as likely to have this problem as capacitors keep the radio memory energized for as long as 36 hours after loss of power.

If you can arrange the transportation, count me in

Every once in a while I'll read a build thread and think "hmm, why didn't I think of that?" On this build thread it happens about once per post.

At the current $5k bid I think you could do far better. I know I'm very harsh on these trucks, but someone has to be. On the patented "Minuit is a rivet-counting scumbag" for-sale MJ evaluation scale, this one scores a solid Avoid/10. Some details that I don't like the look of: - The repaint appears to be of average to poor quality. I see a lot of orange peel, there's several visible chips, no tailgate stickers, etc. I would guess that the repaint is several years old at least. I know I've said it before, but I prefer a worn out original paintjob to a low quality repaint. - LOTS of missing parts. Badges, passenger side lower door sill, passenger side sill guard, mini-console, engine bay relay cover, front air deflector, just to name a few. I really hope this truck comes with a tote of loose missing parts, because some of these aren't going to be easy to find in good shape for the next owner. - The upside down grille and sideways shifter boot paint a picture of a lazily re-assembled truck post paint job. I know I'm drawing conclusions based on simple things, but there's a reason - if someone does crappy work in one place, they're likely to do crappy work everywhere else. If they can't get the visible small details right, who's to say they got the important things you CAN'T see right? For instance, I wouldn't want someone who can't get a grille flipped the right way welding in new floor pans. - I thought for sure that those ZJ wheels were directional (and therefore there's one wheel for the left side and a mirror image for the right side so the "blades" on both sides face the same direction) but nope, every picture I can pull up of a ZJ with those wheels looks the same way as the truck in this listing. The ones on the passenger side are backwards! I can't un-see that now, and those wheels are now dead to me. That's horrible, and whoever signed off on that wheel design back in the 90s should be ashamed of themselves. - That coolant pressure bottle looks old. Eek. - The bench seat appears to have been reupholstered, and it doesn't look like a whole lot of care was taken when the cover was put back on. The piping across the back should be horizontal. - The oil pressure gauge is pegged at 3 o'clock, in exactly the same way as it is when the wrong sender is installed and the engine is running. My guess is that the truck originally had an idiot light cluster but was swapped for a 3/4 cluster at the same time as the odometer was set to zero. If that's the case, that's another half-done job. Of course, it's also possible that the gauge or sender is broken or the sender is unplugged. - I see some sketchy looking wiring going on near the relay center. Possibly related to the non-standard A/C install? - I don't care if the odometer broke and had to be replaced. When that happens, you get the odometer corrected to what it should be. You don't reset it to zero. Not the seller's fault, but still a huge black mark against the truck. - After looking at the A/C in some more detail, it looks to be added on with non-standard parts as @Fernando87mj pointed out. "wrong" HVAC selector panel, non-standard expansion valve, no service ports at the compressor, and the lines don't look right - lots of strange looking parts here, most if not all all of which are almost certainly impossible to find by now. I still don't understand why these add-on A/C jobs weren't done with the OEM parts. If this is typical of the dealer installed A/C systems on these trucks, I'm glad I don't own one because this one appears to be an absolute hackjob. - Look at the picture where the bottom of the passenger side floor pan is visible. Might just be an artifact, but that floor pan doesn't look right. I also see what might be an aftermarket Ziebart undercoating. If that's what it is, don't walk away, RUN! And I'm sure that's not everything I could find if I really looked.

If you look back a few years, Team Cherokee has a bit of a reputation for being less than stellar overall. My main problem with them has been extremely long shipping times, but there have been several instances of outright false advertisements among other things. Can't say I'm surprised by this.

But most most of all, why is the grille upside down? Setting an odometer back to 0 is never okay, even when you really really restore it. They didn't really really restore it. It's no big deal that the mileage isn't exactly correct on a cheapo dumpster fire like my 89 that's had about 5 different instrument clusters installed, but when you try to pass off a sloppily restored truck with miles on it as a 7k original, we've got a word for that that starts with F and ends with raud. On the bright side, anyone with any amount of knowledge about MJs will immediately know that something is very wrong. I don't feel up to doing one of my usual savage teardowns (I'm sure the BAT comment section will rip this thing apart) but they've gone and checked every single box on the "sloppy restoration" list. There's also no "off" position on the HVAC slider (it's on the fan switch instead ), and the graphics look wrong. WTF? There's some weird stuff going on here. I almost feel like making a BAT account just to warn anyone who has serious thoughts of spending money on this truck.

The compass is part of the same board as the display. It's all in the very front of the console.

Awful nice of the previous owner to remove the dreary, garbage drivetrain to make installing something that doesn't suck a little easier.

I'd daily one.

I'm all but certain the factory "MJ" kick panel is just an XJ one they cut a radius out of to clear the parking brake. If you had some equipment (or hell, a band saw and a steady hand) and knew the dimensions of the cut you could produce a perfect MJ kick panel out of an XJ one.

Point of clarification to your point of clarification - a certain breed of tire balance issue can progress to death wobble under the right conditions. The tire shake itself is not death wobble, but it very well can be what starts the suspension oscillating. If anyone disagrees, I would invite them to take trip back in time and drive my 89 in its original configuration of square Cooper front tires, very loose steering box, completely dead steering stabilizer, and multiple ruined tie rod ends. @JMO413 - ditto. After my experiences you couldn't pay me to drive on a set of Cooper tires again. The damn things were more square than round. I had to see them run on a machine to believe it.

There is an old writeup with some pics in my signature. Nothing complicated about it - flip the brackets around from the way they're "supposed" to go and drill two new holes in them straight across from where the existing holes are.

That seems like a typical place for a dealer badge. Otherwise, no idea. If I were buying the truck new, there would be absolutely no words for how pissed I would be if the dealer drilled holes in the tailgate for their stupid badge.

Good work! You should clean the window regulator snakes while you've got them out too.

What's the "play in the steering wheel" situation? Slop in the steering box is one of the things that can allow a small tire shake to turn into death wobble. For what it's worth, both of my death wobble experiences can be directly blamed on the tires. My '91 has never gotten death wobble except for when a tire was being held on by two lug nuts at about 50 mph in a gentle right turn, and a recurring problem with it on my '89 can be summed up as a dynamic tire imbalance side-to-side shake that hit just the right frequency to DW at about 50 miles per hour in a slight left turn. A visibly out of round Cooper tire and a possibly bent wheel were the culprit. Once the offending tire and wheel combination were punted into the dumpster with reckless abandon, no more wobble.

Who wants to spend 200 bucks to add a leak to their vehicle? I know there's at least one of you masochists out there. https://www.ebay.com/itm/233598602850?ul_noapp=true

That's about all you need to do on a late model system. Just keep filling it and squeezing the hose until it won't take any more. That's all I do and I've never had any problems. Once the radiator is full, fill the overflow tank to the full line. The system will eventually self-bleed if there is coolant in the overflow tank to replace escaping air, but it's a good idea to get as much as you can out now. If I had to guess (as someone who's been there and done that) whoever put that radiator in just filled it until it wouldn't take more coolant and didn't bother to squeeze the hose or let the engine come up to temp with the radiator cap off to allow the air to escape. You might want to look over any other work the previous owner did and post anything that looks odd or questionable up here. I'm not accusing the previous owner of being incompetent, but if there are no leaks and they just didn't fill the cooling system up completely, any other work they did is suspect.

Willing to bet there's your problem right there. Air in the cooling system will make a gauge freak out every time.

Sender is on the back of the head, driver side. It is a "resistance to ground" type of sender so clean connections are especially important. Make sure the connector on top of it is clean and tight, as well as making sure there isn't a bunch of crap in the threads the sender screws into - the sender grounds directly to the head through those threads. You may also want to clean the instrument panel ground which is connected to the metal dash frame on the driver side as preventative maintenance. If you do replace, I would strongly suggest replacing it with an OEM Mopar sender. The part number you need is 53005309, and as far as I'm concerned Crown does not count as an OEM part as much as they like to muddy the waters by using OEM part numbers for aftermarket parts. Aftermarket parts will result in an inconsistent and unreliable gauge reading. With the OEM sender, if all is well you shouldn't see that gauge go over the middle in anything near a normal driving condition. Every single Jeep I've ever seen, owned, or worked on with a working OEM sender has read in a consistent and repeatable way. The aftermarket ones are all over the place. For example, a Wells brand aftermarket sender I used read almost thirty degrees higher than the actual temperature - resulting in me wasting a weekend chasing an overheating problem that didn't exist. Other possibilities range from a bad connection at the back of the gauge cluster to a bad gauge, or a broken wire - although I would consider these much less likely than a bad connection at the sender or a bad sender. If you don't know the vehicle's history, making sure the cooling system is generally in good working order would be a good idea. A new (again, Mopar strongly suggested) 195 degree thermostat and a coolant flush would be a good idea, as well as making sure the cooling system is full. The sender is at almost the "top" of the cooling system, so if the system is underfilled and an air pocket forms inside the head, the gauge can become very inconsistent.