My Jeep

Well, I'm 16 and i have my driver's permit, and my dad said that his '89 Jeep Cherokee is going to be mine, so we are going to start working on it some more. It has 192,000 miles on it on its original engine, and before we bought it when it was a a postal mail delivery vehicle it was rolled onto its side in a ditch. Well, now it has a 3" rough country suspension lift that is about 10 years old, a ford 8.8 rear axle, 4.10 gears, 2 year old 32" Goodyear MTR tires on soft 8 rims, trimmed fenders, and a rear bumper I built for it in middle school shop class a few years ago. After trimming the fenders, we also built some front tube fender flares and trimmed the rear quarter panels.


Unfortunately it also has some driver side door cancer as seen in the first photo and a very grimy engine compartment.



Fortunately, by doing some axle swapping work on another guy's Cherokee, (through which we swapped in a disconnect d30 and a d35 in place of a non-disconnect d30 and a DANA 44!!!) we acquired another '89 jeep Cherokee that has no transfer case and a mysteriously not running engine with only 20,000 miles on it since it had some serious work done to it, including RUST FREE DOORS with good speakers and at least a new head gasket and power washing of the engine. The engine will turn over and at least one piston fires even on at least year old gas, but we already found that the distributor was off by one tooth and that two of the spark plug wires were switched, so hmmm....



Well, here is the to-do list so far:

• engine tune up, oil change, and greasing
• try to find the electrical problem that seems to keep running the battery dead
• engine swap if we can get the other one running?
• door switch, at least for the driver door
• finish up the rear fender flares
• windshield replacement
• front bumper?
• paint job, still trying to decide on color, with bed liner on bottom panel and fenders (any ideas?)
• Just a future idea, but possibly a Mercedes diesel engine swap

This isn't going to be much of a build, as it will probably be my daily driver, but any help or suggestions, especially on getting the other engine running, is very appreciated.
Here are some other pics:
The Dana 44 rear axle that is probably for sale



A picture of my dad's half 73 ford half 93 dodge diesel truck that we recently finished. Funny enough, we even used half of each frame.



Thanks!

Why would you swap a D44 out for a D35?

More pictures of the Ford also!

I don't know, we never told the guy that he was swapping out for inferior axles, but they are going on a stock jeep for a relative of his so it doesn't matter. He just wanted the axles to go with the np 231 he is going to swap in in place of the grenaded 243. Well, we swapped the axles 3 months ago, and the other jeep we put them on is still sitting in our yard.... so, whatever... and i might upload more pics of the Ford, its pretty cool, completely redone interior, probably less than $10000 involved in it, including both trucks.