I need money for a new car

It looks that the aftermatch of the crash two years ago is taking it's toll and my engine is starting to exhibit some problems (overheating, loss of cooling fluid etc.)
Therefore view my movies on metacafe:

Polish Drifting - The best video clips are right here
and please rate 5 stars. If the video ranks with at least 3.0 and I get 20 thous views for this video, metacafe will pay me $100 and then $5 for each subsequent 2 thous. views. I need the money ... that Dodge Ram SRT can't wait forever to be purchased by me :)

FORD F650

I WANT ONE OF THESE...
It is ugly looking ... but it's monstrous!

Political statement

 

I don't like poultry ...especially ducks ....just didn't manage to hunt any down yet ;)

Cousin's wedding

 
Today something different - a picture of the car from my cousin's wedding last Wednesday.
p.s. I was going to drive my jeep to the wedding, but 40km from home the engine started overheating, therefore had to return home (with the internal heating set to max to cool the engine down!) and use my wife's car instead ;(

just two pictures from the last weekend

Elevated photography

 
And here's something different today. Here is a picture of my setup for taking elevated photos. The mast attaches to the hitch receiver and extends over 15 meters into the air. As you can see there is a 3D head allowing for 360deg. left-right movement and 90 deg. up-down movement.

Pacer fender flares

 
 
Remember the earlier post reg. fender flares - as you can see I finally installed them...or almost installed them - for now I only had time for the front. Or to tell you the truth I didn't have much idea how to go about installing these on the back, considering the decorative plastic trimming and bumper which extends on the sides and will be difficult to attach to. Nevertheless I already did some mud testing and these work great. i.e. many people install the flares to keep the car road legal - well if your tires do not extend beyond the standard wheel wells, install something like this anyways - do it for your own comfort. Earlier, whenever I would hit a larger puddle of water even on the stock tires, it would amazingly make it across the hood and then flow inside through any of the open windows. Another problem was that if such a wave of water hit the windshield and flowed down onto the hood, some of it made it into the air intake of the interior blower fan - making the windows inside fog instantly. Now with the flares installed the problem seamed to dissapear - I did some testing on a flooded parking lot after the recent rainfall and the water beautifully splashes at 45deg. angles to the sides - next time I'll have to take someone with me to take pictures - it must have been a very nice view from outside.

Optima

 
Can you see it?
Yes...that little red thingy in the left hand corner...my battery was starting to fail...so I bought myself an Optima.
Since my Jeep is a Diesel, I used to have a 74Ah unit installed whilst this Optima is only 50Ah...but to tell you the truth it works great. With the capability of 1100 Amps at 0 deg. the glow plugs heat up in no time - almost twice as fas as with the previous battery. Now I'm thinking of getting a second battery like this, but the yellow top version, for the foreseen winch. It will go in the place of the air filter box, when this is replaced by a tubular unit, to facilitate installation of a snorkel. ;)

replacement spicer CV joint part

 
Today another package arrived from the US (the earlier mentioned CV driveshaft replacement part I managed to buy on yet another auction) therefore it looks I'll have a bussy weekend trying to rebuild and install the front driveshaft. I already managed to get the old ball off the driveshaft, although it was not an easy task. It would come off half way and then would get stuck - you can't see it, but it has a needle bearing inside, where these needles run on a shaft protruding at the end of the driveshaft and when I tried to pull the ball off, the needles inside would reorient at such an angle that they wedged between the inner runway and shaft making removal impossible. So what to do in such a situation? ... HEAT - as you might remember from physics when you heat something up, it expands. Unfortunatelly I didn't have a blowtorch or anything similar handy...but a grinder worked just as well. Pressing hard against the running grinder the ball heated up from the friction, turning all those 'nice colors' and simply fell off.

unexpected surprise

 
so what can you stumble uppon in the tall grass when offroading? Yes ...these are wild boars...fortunatelly they were more scarred than we were...and therefore ran away...otherwise it could have been 'interesting' ;

vacation ...

 
and some more mud and water ;)

My vacation

 
Some of you might be wondering what did I do on my vacation ...well it rained for a few days, therefore instead of going to the beach we found ourselves a better pastime ... M U D ! ! ! ;)

x-mas time!

 
 
 
 
Look at all the 'gifts' I have received.
I just returned from my 10 day holiday at the sea just to see two of the few packages arrive, which I have won on Ebay. One of them is a set of Pacer fender flare extensions I managed to buy for 1/4 of the price for which they sell here...and that's including shipping ... and what's even better, these are the heavy duty 3 inch type with wire reinforcements ;) although I have a dillema now as how to install them...or to be more exact - should I have them come all the way down in the front onto the plastic bumper, or should I end them where the metal fender ends and meets the bumper? I guess I'll have to dig through my 4x4 / offroad magazines and see how other's do it.
The other one is a hood bra - this little gadget simply is nowhere to be found in Poland, whilst with our roads and all the gravel etc. shooting at you from the cars in front, this should come on the car as standard - I asked once at the dealership about it and it was only available on 'special order' i.e. as you can imagine the price was also very 'special'.
I got it on ebay from Eric here: http://myworld.ebay.com/erockjeep, he unfortunatelly does not take paypal whilst bidpay for some reason refused both my credit cards, fortunatelly we were able to complete the transaction via Western Union. Of course Western Union clerk asked three times if I'm sure that I want to transfer money to some unknown individual, that it might be unsafe etc. I took the risk and it was definatelly worth it - as a matter of fact Eric shipped the package so quickly and the paperwork was done so perfectly, that the package made it here quicker than I get most packages from other cities in Poland!

31" tires - modifications continue

Well if you haven't noticed in the earlier post pertaining to tires and required spacers ...the bumper had to be hacked off. The spacers got rid of the problem with tires interfering with the control arms...but they now started grabbing the bumper with even a slight turn. This is a very quick job - only 10 minutes or so - the bumper already has a small ridge, where it can be nicelly cut, therefore I think someone already designed it for this purpose ;)
And no, I did not have to take the bumper off to do this - I have included that picture just to illustrate what's underneath (to tell you the truth I took it off earlier to take measurements for an ARB style bumper...although that project might never come to life as apparently Polish lawmakers want to totally outlaw steel box bumpers ;(.
It would have been sufficient to just cut off the inner corners of the bumper in the wheel well, however this groove was simply asking to be cut...especially since this greatly improves the front descent/ascent angle.
I will be placing a stainless steel radiator guard plate on the bottom soon, and some recovery mounts with shackles soon, therefore keep watching. (Although it will be a while from now, as in 5 hours I will be driving down to the sea for my 2 weeks vacation)

1" Wheel spacers

 
 
The spacer installation was a snap - in case you are wondering - they look like to ones on the picture. I was able to grab a set of used steel ones (not the cheap aluminum crap everyone is selling) suitable for heavy duty offroad use for basically 'spare change'.
So these are now installed, however the tires now stick out too much and I will need to install fender flares to keep the car road legal, however just another 'slight modification' was needed - although if you don't know what to look for, you probably won't notice it ... read the next post then...

Comparison to 'stock' jeep

Here is a picture of my Grand compared to an almost stock (i.e. with the God knows what for installed 'angle od descent reducing piping' ;) on the front), which I happened to come uppon a supermarket parking lot when buing some sockets to install the wheel spacers today.

31 x 10.5 x 15 Tires

 
As I mentioned before ... you need body lift to fit those biger tires. As you can read at many places on the internet, you need to inches of lift to be able to fit 31 x 10.5 x 15 tires ... almost true ;)
Well they fit just fine in the wheel well ... the problem is with tight turns. With an agressive tread like on these Kumho KL71 MT tires, they start grabbing the lower control arms making something like a "K"-turn turn into a 10x K-turn since you are able to turn the wheels just part of the way. To overcome this, there are two solutions:
1. change the wheels to one's with wider spacing ('ET' factor of around -20) - I suspect that people writing on the internet that there were no problems with installing tires of this size probably might have already such wider spaced wheels ...although this causes another problem (more on that in the next post)
2. the other one is to mount special 1" (or wider) spacers, to move the wheels outward.
Since I spoted innexpensive spacers (~$55 for a complete set of German factory made 1" spacers - i.e. not some cheep aluminum DIY job) on one of the Polish auction sites, I swipped them and installed them today.

budget 2" lift - drawbacks

After about a year of driving with the 2" lift, a few drawbacks of the 'budget approach' become aparent. Supposedly 2" is the maximum which does not require additional suspension / driveline modifications etc., nevertheless it does lead to quicker wear of components. As you can see the CV joint failed - fortunatelly everyone here in Poland was sugesting I will need to replace the entire driveshaft, but searching around in the internet I found that the fault which occured here, can be easily fixed with the replacement of one component (unfortunatelly one which was nowhwere to be found in Poland - even though Spicer has a dealer here they wanted to sell me a complete driveshaft ... for a fraction of the cost of a used jeep ;) ) Here again Ebay came to the rescue and I was able to obtain the part for $33,50 including S/H to Poland (about 1/5th of the cost I would have to pay for a used driveshaft in unknown condition).
The part is on the way, therefore I will post some picture of the reinstallation process soon. While at it, I plan on greasing everything with special water repelling lithium greese. I think that it would be wise to drop the transfer case a bit as obviously the CV joint is operating at a too steep angle ... but then again, if I have to drop the transfer case ... might as well go for a 4.5 - 6" lift ;)

2" lift

 
 
So where do you start in making the jeep more off-roadworthy?
You need to lift it - this will provide you with
1. more ground clearance
but that is not the most important, what is the key factor is that
2. you will be able to fit bigger tires
I went with the budget option of 2" as this can be achieved using just innexpensive spacers under the springs.
p.s. if you are looking for some, I got mine from http://extreme-engineering.com/ including the bumpstop extensions (the picture aside is from their web site)... however they also sell on Ebay, where I was able to swipe a set for only $56(a great saving over the $90 they have on the site) where the total including shipping to Poland turned out to $81. If you are not from the USA, there are many such deals on Ebay, but the problem is that many Americans are afraid to ship abroad (but the formalities are realy 'childs play' - all that is needed is just a small additional slip of paper which needs to be filled out, declaring the item description and value for customs purposes in the recipient's country) What was great about Anthony DeFalco is that unlike many of the other ebayers he had no problems whatsoever in sending these to Poland, whilst also (as seen above) having reasonable S/H costs (some of the other's asked would for example ship to Poland but only using UPS etc. for something like 100 to even 250 USD for next day service)
There were good installation instructions included, but I also found a ton of sites ('use Google Luke...') where everything was detailed step by step including pictures. All of these instructions claimed it will take anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour per wheel. ... it took me over 6 hours and I even had the spring compression tool, which supposedly makes things easier.
However the problem was not with the springs, spacer etc ... but with the f^$#$! optional bumpstops ... original bumpstops are built in such a way, that a rubber stop is pressed into a metal cup screwed to the frame. Unfortunatelly water, salt (winter), sand etc. gets in there and the screws basically become welded to the frame. Therefore being the perfectionist I am, I had to mount the bumpstop spacers also and the majority of the time was fighting with the screws using a blow torch etc. to get them loosened ... and even so one got broken and I had to drill it out, re-thread, etc.

couple weeks later

So what happens to a Jeep after you flip it on the side - you need to replace two pairs of doors and the front fender... a total of ~2800 PLN i.e. ~1000 USD in used parts including repainting. I was suprised how innexpensive this turned out, as a year earlier I have paid a similar amount for just fixing some rusty fenders on my Nissan Sunny and repainting the whole car. As you can see it looks as new ...now also sporting a nice roof case for my photo mast (more about that later)

2 days after

So what do you do after you buy a Jeep? ...of course you go out and test it!
(ascent/descent angles, articulation ...)

And just after two days of fun ... you roll it on a straight dirt road. But with a little help from your friends ...

it's back on it's wheels. So how did this happen. Do you know how everyone tells you to check/replace all belts, fluids etc. after you buy a new vehicle. Well not to often anyone tells you to check the tire pressure. I didn't (mistake #3) Of course this was not the only reason for driving for a bit on two wheels - but if it was OK, the tire would not be taken off the rim and the car would have felt back onto the wheels instead of onto the side (I checked the pressure afterwards and all tires had something in between 15 and 20 PSI of pressure. So my advice: CHECK YOUR TIRE PRESSURE! (especially if you want to 'fly' 60-70 km/h down a dirt road)
The amazing thing is that going on the side did not piss me off as much as sitting in the car afterwards and noticing the text on orange sticker on the sunshade ..you know the one which reads ... "WARNING: Sport Utility Vehicles handle differently from ordinary passenger cars. Avoid sharp turns and abrupt maneuvers. Always keep cargo loads within specified weight limits, distribute cargo evenly and secure it from shifting. For specific details, please read your owner's manual for on-and off-road driving tips. ..."