My current car, a 2005 Cherokee KJ 2.8 CRD Sport, is my first 4x4...It's also the first car I have owned with an engine capacity bigger than 2 litres and the first I have owned with six speed manual gearbox.
The 1.6 HDi engine in my previous car, a beloved Citroen C4 Grand Picasso, blew up on a Friday (blew a hole in the block and all the oil shot out onto the M3 motorway), on the way to work, so I needed to get another car real fast for the following Monday.
The KJ had been sitting in a local second hand car dealer for a long time apparently, and at £2995, it was the cheapest car they had in their yard. It only had 51,000 miles on the clock so this immediately got my attention. I fancied getting a 4x4 to help be pull my boat and trailer up slippery slipways...This had been a real pain in the Citroen, with the front wheels scrambling for grip on the muddy stones. The only solution was to tie a rope on the front via the towing eye and get several people to pull the rope at the same time as I revved it!
The KJ already had a towbar fitted, with twin electric sockets too, but the towball part itself was missing, making it useless. The dealer gave me a similar towball fitting off an old Thule tow bar he had lying around, but it was noticably smaller and narrower. I had to make two 10mm thick packing plates and drill an extra 12mm hole through the towbar to make it fit...It still didn't look right though as the ball was at 60 degrees instead of 90 degrees, and it was a bit too close to the spare wheel to allow the trailer hitch to get over it. Luckily for me, my KJ is still effected by the current recall on KJ's to have a towbar fitted...So I am going to take the existing one off so they have to fit a new one!
It came with the stock 16" steel wheels, with worn-looking, standard, 235/70R16 BFG A/T tyres on the front...But on the back wheels it had 255/70R16 A/T tyres, which are 1.1 inch bigger in diameter!...To save some weight, and fuel, I resolved to get a set of alloys ASAP and fit low rolling resistance road tyres instead of the A/T's, as my KJ was going to be my daily commuting ride to work and back, rather than for off-road use.
Managed to find a nice set of five Ultrastar, five spoke alloys ( from a 1998 Grand Cherokee), going on ebay for £150, and they were local enough that I could go and pick them up, saving £39.99 in postage.
Before picking them up I had ordered four brand new Alphamotors DK365 235/70R16 106H, road-going SUV tyres for £118 with free postage on ebay, and they arrived by courier the following morning!
Took them down to the place that had the wheels (a second-hand wheel and tyre dealer), but initially, after perusing the official Jeep offset tables for a while they told me that they would not fit without using 1" spacers...So I quickly looked up spacers on ebay, via my mobile phone and saw that the cheapest set of 1" spacers were £76 for four, which didn't seem too bad.
I asked if he could try one of the Ultrastars on, just to confirm that they would not fit, and he agreed to try fitting one...To everyone's surprise, it fitted perfectly, without spacers!
So he fitted the four new DK365's to four of the five Ultrastars, balanced all four and put them on my KJ, with the remaining Ultrastar thrown in the boot for later.
What a huge difference there was! Smoother ride, quieter, no more steering wobble, far better road handling. It now feels safe and planted when cornering, like a small hatchback.
I am averaging over 37mpg, closer to 38mpg in fact, so I it is far more affordable to run than I though it was going to be.
There were two other issues with it that I wanted to sort out...The bonnet (hood) support struts seemed to be broken as they could not hold up the weight of the bonnet...Turns out someone had fitted rear tailgate struts to the bonnet! I ordered a new pair of struts on Amazon for £11.50, but when they arrived it was immediately clear that they would not fit as they were at least 3" too long.
So I ordered another pair, from ebay this time, which fitted perfectly. The new struts have larger diameter piston rods (8mm vs 6mm) and they work perfectly now.
The other issue was that it had the wrong battery fitted...It had a 113 battery which is only 50Ah capacity and with a cranking power of just 500CCA...Fine in the summer, but come come the winter, when the cold would reduce the batteries capacity, it might not have the power to turn over my big VM 2.8 Diesel.
After much research, I found the perfect battery...An Advanced 096R XD, with a much more meaty 77Ah capacity and a cranking power of 780CCA. It was a bit longer than the plastic battery tray in my KJ though so I simply modified the tray by breaking off the vertical lip of the tray closest to the engine. I filed it flush and then the new battery dropped strait in. Last job was to make a new clamping bracket to hold it in. I used 3" of 1" x 1" x 1/8" Aluminium angle, cut to 1" x 10mm x 1/8", and drilled an 8mm (5/16") hole in the middle of the wide section to give wiggle room for the M6 clamping bolt that came with the tray. Clamped it down tight and the job was done.
20180621_142653psc2 by
Alf Beharie, on Flickr
20180621_142639PS by
Alf Beharie, on Flickr