Jeep XJ Overland Build Ep01: Vehicle Overview

Description

At the start of the year in my 2018 update video I talked about a trip that myself and Megan are going on early this year. We will be camping out of our vehicle and traveling through Europe into Norway and then later on, Sweden.

I purchased the Jeep a couple of years ago mainly for work as its useful for carrying all the kit to various bushcraft sites when running courses. I then started building it up more and more, taking part in events with off road groups. Its gotten to a stage where Its more bias to off road than overland but its in great shape, mechanically simple and sparse on electronics. I know it very well and as a platform it will make an excellent camper for the trip, especially as we head further north into more open wilderness.

I hope you guys enjoy the series.

Big thanks to the guys at Ruff Stuff Specialties for providing us with some of their frame stiffeners, review and installment videos coming very soon -

Center Stiffeners -https://www.ruffstuffspecialties.com/catalog/XJRAIL.html

Front Stiffeners - https://www.ruffstuffspecialties.com/catalog/R2093.html

MCQBushcraft:

If your interested in Bushcraft & Survival skills, fishing, hunting, fire lighting, plants & mushrooms, camp cooking, shelter building, self reliance, wilderness & primitive living skills, weaving plant fibers, knives, axes, saws and maintaining these tools in the field and much much more then check out my channel page below for playlists and more videos.

All my Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/user/MCQBushcraft/videos

Check out my Shop for hand made products and more:

http://www.mcqbushcraft.co.uk/shop/

Have a look at my Amazon Stores:

UK Store - http://astore.amazon.co.uk/mcqbushcraft-21

US Store - http://astore.amazon.com/mcq-20

Follow me on Social Media:

Connect On My Website - http://www.MCQBushcraft.co.uk

Connect On Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/MCQBushcraft

Connect On Instagram - http://www.instagram.com/mcqbushcraft1

Connect On Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/MCQBushcraft

Tags: jeep,cherokee,xj,jeep cherokee,4x4,jeep xj,xj build,offroad,jeep build,build,xj project,cherokee build,suspension,diy,rough country,cherokee project,overland vehicle,camping,roof rack,rock crawling,bug out jeep,bug out vehicle,overland build,jeep cherokee xj,mcqbushcraft jeep,mcqbushcraft jeep build,mcqbushcraft DIY,mcqbushcraft Workshop,mcqbushcraft sweden,mcqbushcraft adventure,expedition vehicle,overland,lifted jeep,off-road,jeep project

Video Transcription

hi there guys it's Mike from mcq bushcraft here and welcome to episode 1 of the build series if you watched my 2018 channel update at the beginning of this year we talked about a trip myself and me and Megan will be going on in the spring of this year in April I'll be driving through Europe rooftop tent camping but primarily exploring northern Scandinavia we've been to Sweden in Norway before we won't always wanted to go back there and do a bit of traveling be a bit more mobile and obviously we're going to need a vehicle to do this I'm going to introduce the vehicle and also talk about what I need to do to it before the trip it's a Jeep Cherokee XJ 1999

it's a right-hand drive export model in 2.5 turbo diesel when I first bought the vehicle it was in a pretty good state but it had some really nasty tires on it some 31 inch remoulded mud tires they had a rough country 4.5 inch suspension lift on it short arm it's come a long way though and we're gonna go through this bit by bit first of all we're gonna start with the engine bay so this is the engine just here this is a VMO tera 4 cylinder 2.5 turbo diesel produces 118 horsepower at 4000 rpm and 300 Newton meters of torque at 2,000 rpm this engine isn't really spoken very highly of in this country it's usually commonly referred to as the boat engine but most of the comments about the engine are through high maintenance costs but also just through hearsay an actual lack of experience from people who say something about it and then somebody else listens to that and repeats it and a reputation is born like many but it's actually a very good engine it started life as an agricultural engine it was never intended for boat use you'll find it throughout Europe in lots of different vehicles primarily agricultural so small tractors was very commonly used in Austria and it functioned very well thought it was made for then it really likes being under heavy load the main complaint of the engine and this is where a lot of misunderstanding and fusion comes from is the cylinder heads it has a separate head for each cylinder and they did that because they made a three cylinder four cylinder eight cylinder version of this with different agricultural applications and it just meant they could use the same cylinder head for each one and and if one cylinder had went then you take that off and you just replaced that one this is the mark two of the engine the latest one from my knowledge so it's a little bit different on this if you take one cylinder head off you disturb the others and they all need to be removed new gasket and it all has to be done there used to be a separate gasket for each cylinder head but those days are generally over and they were weaker anyway so people did away with them when they could now they use a multi-layered gasket and you never really get any kind of head gasket issues and most of the time people don't keep an eye on the coolant level the coolant level drops you get an air pocket and cylinder head number one which is usually the one that goes in that case you get a hot spot and then you get a crack so most of the issues with the engine are just down to poor maintenance and usually when these engines go it's so expensive to do the job that people just scrap the vehicle and and that's that's basically why you don't see too many of them getting rebuilt anymore I do all the work myself I can do the rebuild myself and half done and I had some issues with the cylinder head didn't have any head cracking issues but a studs that holds one of the valve arms on snapped snapped clean off in the face of the block we tried drilling it out and a friend of mine used and easy and he snapped the easy-out off inside the stud so we couldn't get that out try drilling that out no good even getting around it and picking it out it just didn't work so I decided to strip the engine bay dome and do a bit of a rebuild on the whole thing I got four new cylinder heads new gaskets it's a fairly simple job to be honest most people could do it themselves it's just a lot of time and losing a lot of skin off your knuckles while you're doing it but basically you just measure the piston protrusion measure the line of protrusion select your gasket in my case it was the standard gasket because nothing had really changed and I did that rebuild just over a year ago the engines been running really really well one really good thing about the engine is it has an air cam belt all timing chain at all and it's all gear timed and this number one fuel injector just here which is the only injector with a wire coming out of it has a sensor in it and that sets the timing for the whole engine so the engine can actually adjust its timing depending on how much those gears wear so it should never ever lose its timing so all in all it's actually a very robust engine and some of the things I've done to it you can see that I've replaced the actual heater matrix and listen pipes coming out to the heater matrix just that I plumbed in copper I've run it past the viscous fan just here at the front I changed the viscous coupling on the fan as well that's something you want to keep an eye on did put a new battery in just here I mean that factories from Halfords they said it was a three year warranty this lasted a year is already dying I did check the alternator the alternator is fine is the battery it's not holding charge something a little bit quirky here this is part of the rear axle the actual breather on the rear axle is blowing oil and we have the other breathers just here and the transmission transfer case and front axle so we can't flood or contaminate the oil if we do any wading through heavy water this is the fuel filter obviously worth changing every now and then and we have a sensor down in there on cylinder number three which I did change as well and I do carry a spare and that sends temperature to the dash and tells you how hot the engines running gives you an indication anyway so that is worth changing as well if it's really really old but one major change that I did on a lot of the engine really was just them studying it I'm not particularly keen on repeatedly putting bolts into aluminium and these don't have to be talked very highly at all but I've got studs on all the rocker arm blocks and things studs here studs here it just means the nuts can be taken off and the stud remains in place which i think is far better than having to undo a bolt out of an aluminium thread all the time

the thing I've done it's plumbed in the new intercooler the original intercooler lived underneath the vehicle just here and there was a sort of box tank section from the cowl that housed it but the problem is is if you're going off-road and you're using the vehicle for what I use it for it gets clogged with mud so I remove the intercooler to the front plumbed it in using aluminium two and a quarter inch pipe and that pipe there just means that you keep your boost so if your silicone pipe it expands slightly when the turbocharger is going you don't want to do that to say this point here stops that happening I've also raised the expansion tank by two inches this is just a small mod you can do it just keeps that air pocket and the expansion tank much higher one thing I change as well is the thermostat lives in there at the top of this water gallery here so I do change that as well when I service the vehicle and drain the coolant and I've also replaced the water pump as well and the serpentine belt this is a additional thing I've put on this is an oil cap can it just captures all of the moisture and the rubbish that comes out the crankcase so it doesn't get recirculated back and get burnt up in the engine but you can see where the intercooler comes in we've actually had to do away with the factory air intake which would win a box here with a standard air filter in I've had to put this temporary thing on with a cone filter just that and this is going to be gone we've got the ECU just here as well this can be fully submerged this ECU without damage as it's sat in a silicon housing and the connectors have rubber seals on them another thing I decided to do was put a new radiator in I originally had a massive intercooler mounted on this vehicle huge uns corner of the front it was just gigantic way too big I had loads of turbo lag off of it so I put a smaller intercooler on the kind of match the original size but the different shape it never had to put a new towel on because the original cowl has like a lump at the bottom for that intercooler as I mentioned before so I got the cowl off the petrol Cherokee then put it on here it took some digging around but it's on there now and all-in-all this vehicle runs very very cool about 85 degrees and it full load just below 90 so I've never had any overheating issues since I've rebuilt the engine he's been running real well and even on long drives when I'm driving for 8 hours up north it just chugs away but you do have to take into account that it's a not particularly powerful engine and not got a lot of horsepower a lot of talk cause Diesel's do which is just what they're for but you get about 35 to 36 miles per gallon on long drives and about 30 to 31 just driving around normally so that's the engine we'll move on to the drivetrain and then the axles and then go through some of the other stuff this is the front end of the vehicle this is the front axle and diff this is a Dan of 30 good axle as long as you don't start putting massive massive tires on it which I haven't but it's been pretty good it's an open diff so there's no locker or traction aid in there it's just a standard open differential I've added on rock-crusher diff cover but the steering is all factory that's all gonna need to be changed that's not tough enough for what I generally do with the vehicle and I've already bent this and had to straighten it whilst I was out off-roading I had to use a jack to straighten it say all these tie rods all this steering needs to change really I've got a drop pitman arm just there as well to help with some of the angles here because obviously you start lifting vehicles all the geometry changes and you can get really nasty bumps there fortunately I don't have any of that I did at one point and I've put in a extended track bar just to accommodate the lift so it can bolt into the original point just here and what I've done just here is I've fitted a m12 bolt instead of a standard M tan with the 12.9 tensile strength bolt so it's a pretty strong mounting point just here on the axle I've kind of made my aim sway bar disconnects quite drilling and putting a sleeve over that needs to be changed as well the bushes on the sway bar are almost completely gone and I'm really starting to feel it when I'm turning but in terms of what I've done to the axle I haven't done a huge amount really I've changed obviously the seals in there done the side carrier bearings I haven't touched the pinion I've put on the ends of the axles some outer axle oil seals just to stop a lot of the rubbish getting in and touching the main seal that's here for the diff for the fluid in the diff so I filled these axle tubes full of grease so that really helps stop the water get even further in but that will need all dragging out and redoing because it's been 2 years and I've been for a lot of water so I expect that we'll need replenishing I have strengthened some of the mounting points by adding extra steel just here for this upper control arm mount also done the same the lower control arm mounts and added extra steel so it's almost like a mini skid plate one of the main thing I did do with the axle is I replace the axle shafts as well I've put some heavy-duty aftermarket axle shafts in there with just slightly larger eyes around the u-joint say we're all in all I've been really happy with the axle but let's move to the real one this is the rear axle this is a downer 35 and this is probably the least desirable axle that you can get on the Cherokees it's not a bad axle but if you do push it and you start putting big tires on and you're giving it loads and loads of acceleration and wheel spinning everywhere and you abuse it you will snap an axle shaft but in a diesel like this where it's really all talk and slow speeds I've not had any issues with it I did do a rebuild on it I'd replace the side carrier bearings or seals the wheel bearings get the pinion bearings pinion seal crush leave pre-loaded it all correctly and that was when I was doing a Riga re gave this to 410 with some aftermarket gears and they were used sadly I had very little knowledge of it at the time but used gears are quite hard to get a good gear pattern and regear I did get it to be fairly quiet but it was just so noisy I ended up taking it out and going back to 373 which is what the gear ratio is of this axle and from one if a good axle came along like a Chrysler 8 in a court or a down a 44 for the right price and it was a straight swap I put it in but until that comes along I'm not too worried about changing it I've done quite a lot of off-roading in this and been up some fairly steep climbs and wheel spinning and never really had any issues I do have two spare axle shafts for this at home and I've put the same diff cover on as well I've just noticed this shock is leaking these rough country four and a half inch lifted shocks come with the lift kit they've been in for a while all four need changing before we go that well there doesn't even do anything behind me and that one there is now leaking say that one's dead too which probably explains the bit of banks at the back end this is the lift kit we're running it's a rough country four and a half inch lift short arm although I've made some changes to it it was pretty hard on the suspension or on me driving it when I first drove the vehicle but I did make some changes to make it way more comfortable and got a four and a half inch lifted spring there I've just put on some some aluminium tubing on there and added a new bump stop just to tidy this area up obviously packed in some undercoat and grease under there so it's not water trap and drilled a hole through the bottom of the bump stop one thing about these vehicles you get a bit of a water trap with dirt here if you let it build up and especially it builds up on the top of the bump stops if you drill a hole through the bump stop it allows it to all drain away if you get in deep water which is just a useful thing to do if you're not a fan of rust it's got a spacer on top and the reason that that space is there is on the back end clad as a leaf spring relocation bracket that dropped it down and allows you to adjust the leaf spring at 45 degrees so that lifted it by another inch and a half so I just had to put a spacer on and I cut the spacer in half and put a layer of rubber in just to take away some of the impact but that shock needs changing as well and we need to get longer shocks because it can over articulate pass off the shock can actually give out one thing I have done as well

it's added in a hockey puck bumpstop so that's three hockey pucks bolted together then actually need to bolt into the the bottom you just put a bit of grease underneath it and it sits there quite happily and it just stops the tire over articulating and ripping the arch off you do need to do that unless you want to cut away a wheel arch with a disc cutter which I didn't want to do I also put a control arm drop bracket in which it lowers the mounting point for the control arm at the bottom and the top as well it does both and that gives you your factory geometry back and again aids articulation drive quality it stops all of that judder getting sent straight up into the frame here and actually aligns the suspension to do the work so that was a massive change and it did it did a lot actually so this is the relocation bracket on the back it allows you to mount the leaf spring hanger at 45 degrees which gives you a much better ride quality as a lot of the impact is taken up and it is able to move freely rather than just being mated straight up like that transferring all that energy up into the body it does give you a bit more lift I didn't want any more lift on this it had a four and a half inch lift on it which was fine for this tire size and everything I did but I wanted better ride quality so I put this bracket sat on this is a rough country bracket set and it just gave me more lift so I had to balance the front out with that spacer which I didn't really want to do but it's done now and it's not gonna go any higher than this and anything it should do but these are the leaf springs that I got with the lift kit the Jeep came with them it came with a full leaf pack and they're worn out so I need to think about new leaf springs but that brings me on the tires really I said when I got the vehicle I had some horrible 31 remould mud tires on and I went to 32 by 1150 BFGoodrich all terrains I went with them all terrain because I'm on the road a lot with this and I'm not off-road for the majority well I used to run the mud terrains they were terrible on the road especially in the wet they really affected the braking distance or stopping distance of the vehicle because I think people look at mud terrain and they think all those big lugs on the bottom of the tire must have tons of grip but on a road it's exactly the opposite you know you start skidding around in the rain and you stopping distances are effective it's it's not too safe say because I'm on the road more than I am off-road even though I do do a lot of off-roading this truck is used for work doing the bushcraft courses lugging all the gear and spare time as well this tire here has served me really well they've done brilliantly I air them down for about 15 psi and I run them on a 15 by 8 steel wheel modular steel wheel and it's got a - 32 offset to keep the wheel far away from the front control arms because on full lock the tire would be touching the control arms but let's move on to the bodywork and the bumpers so as you can see I don't have the stock bumper on the Cherokee anymore I actually got an aftermarket winch bumper this is made out of four million six mil steel very strong bumper you can see there's a mounting point for a winch just here I don't have a winch all right something I'm considering but there are a lot of money and we don't really have it in the budget so I do have a turf or winch that I'm gonna borrow for the trip potentially if I'm not able to secure a winch for it but it connects to the actual frame of the vehicle very solidly just one plate of steel welded straight to the bumper hugs the frame ties into the steering box bolts and it sandwiches the frame so you have a plate on the other side as well with actual tie through cylindrical pieces of metal that the bolts go through good recovery points on it as well so one major change I made to the vehicle was to this rear quarter panel here and this is called a cut and fold mod it usually comes all the way down to here none of this is here this is all stuff I've added on but this panel comes down to the back there has a plastic wrap around piece that clips in and connects to the back of this stock bump here the reason I cut all that away a lot of people do it for ground clearance a lot of people do it for rust because it's a problem area I did it because it was just totally rotten you know the drain plug was hanging out and everything was a bit corroded so I chopped all that off put a new plate of metal in treated it all made it level with the boot so it does extend out a little bit more inside but there aren't a lot of options in this country for aftermarket bumpers there dear - that kind of change that you make so I decided to take the stock bumper put some baffles in it strengthen it and out of this box action on the outside and you can actually hi-lift jack off of this now and lift the vehicle there is a little bit of movement still in it but we're gonna run this back to the actual frame and tie it in to a tying kit I made you can buy those as well it's an insert in the back of the frame I've got videos on all of this coming up after this video so if you're interested you can obviously stay tuned for those but it ties all of this in together makes a very solid recovery point stiffens up the back end stops the body flexing so much and really toughen up that area another piece that I made was a frame stiffening kit the rungs along the bottom of the frame made out of six mil put some box section on it extended the bump stop with it as well because you need to do that at this tire come up and tear this plastic arch off in the past they got to extend the bump stops if you're not prepared to actually cut the panel away and I wasn't so this frame stiffening kit ties into all the factory bolt holes including the front anti-roll bar the sway bar and it ties into the tying kit we made as well so it makes for an incredibly stiff rear end which is great on a vehicle but in a later video so we're going to be stiffening the whole uni frame on this vehicle so if you are interested in that then you can stay tuned for that as well this is just a small change that I made putting on some hood vents I don't think they do a huge amount the engine stays pretty cool without them but on hot days when you turn the engine off it's just somewhere for that residual heat to escape so one thing I considered when I bought the vehicle was the condition of the actual body of the vehicle this is a what you call in this country a monocoque or a unibody or a uni frame it's actually neither it's more of a uni frame vehicle because it still has a frame it's just permanent collected connected to the bottom of the actual vehicle so if it was too corroded and really heavily used as an off-road vehicle I would have never have bought it I

inspected the underneath of it when I bought it and it was in really good condition and one job I wanted to do when I bought it was strip it down so I took all the arches off all the interior even the actual mirrors the lights the tires the axles we stripped the thing down was just a shell got a shot blaster underneath clean the underneath of it thoroughly dealt with any rough spots as in if there was bad areas they'd be cut out new metal would be welded in and then we treated it all so I used inner troll it's like a cavity wax that creeps about 20 centimeters and actually has a lot of rust inhibitors in it it's a brilliant product and then a much heavier coating of undercoat underneath not rubberized more of a wax under Kate and I did that two years ago and I occasionally come back to areas where I'm doing changes and I clean back the area and I'm always quite happy to see good steel underneath and we've got new paintwork so the bottom of the doors have been underneath all the window trim underneath the mirrors so you can see the seal as well and the stat pier has been done when I stripped it down I did the inside T so the seats came out everything was etched primed bed lined you can see the bottom of the door there has been done and inside the door T so the door cards were came off windows came out and all the inside of the doors was treated and cavity waxed as well really big job was the drip rails the drip rails on the Cherokee this took me about four days to do this job I had to strip back all of the roof in this area clean it all treat it I did that about two years ago I primed embed lined it's really held up very well and and very strong even with trees and branches brushing against it when I've been offroad so that is a quite a big job and getting this off as well and just treating around the bolt holes that connect it to the to the sheet metal is quite important too you know I wouldn't rely on this I've actually got a front runner slimline tea roof rack to go on here and that'll be coming up in a later video a change I always wanted to do was eliminate the flange here that connects the wheel well to the floor pan of the actual boot

you usually have a lip of metal much like you do on the sill problem aerials and all old cars you end up with rust building up between them because the paint in there is very thin I continuously welded on the inside of the arch and ground this all away all the way around and completely got rid of the actual lip there so that no water or dirt can ever get in there again did that a couple of years ago been solid rusts never come back no issues so it just makes it much easier to clean as well and you're just eliminating problem areas the way these old vehicles develop issues and you end up having to cut bits out and weld it in the future so I shouldn't really ever have to touch that again and you can see I've made a plastic arch as well these arches are actually off of the older model Cherokee I didn't like the way that the newer arches on this model connected to the sheetmetal they use like some nasty strip of metal that always rusts and it's just not good so these are actually mounted on in a very different way than you would normally expect and they're actually about a millimeter away from the actual body panel here while I strip the vehicle down and did this paintwork on the bottoms of the doors I took the arches off too and did the same to the underneath treated it all and got it all sorted out there wasn't actually too much rust there's just a little bit here and there like you'd expect for a vehicle that's almost 20 years old but what I've used is actual metal washers with rubber backs to them to sandwich the holes where the bolts go through and that way no water can actually get in and it's a really sound way of making an area or easy to clean and all that work I've done I didn't just want it ruined by mud and grit flying up in there that's why I built this wheel well and I did that a while ago and I've stripped it down once every year at the end just to take a look and it's still absolutely spotless under there and with all the water I go through I'm quite impressed really it's held up really well with the paintwork obviously bad line the inside and put these mats inside you just take these out take the dirt out and I was really happy to see when I bought this vehicle is one thing I kept my eye out for where's the floor pan and it's solid as a rock

so obviously whoever had this Cherokee before me took the carpet so a long time ago because I've seen some seriously bad condition flaws in these vehicles so that's the Cherokee and that's where it is to date I've probably missed a load of things out because it has been 2 years I've been working on it fairly consistently over that time and you kind of forget the finer details of some of the jobs you did I mean there are things like ball joints lots of bushes lots of stripping it down bed lining the engine bay cavity waxing inside the box sections all these sorts of things so I hope you join me for this episode all these episodes coming up this series the build series and obviously after that's done we'll be on our way hopefully we'll have a roof tent fitted by then and the front run a roof rack and we'll be ready to go and then we can obviously start getting into all the kit as well but I have to take with me myself as well as Megan because she's be coming along as well see and bringing all her gear too so I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you very very soon in another one take care guys