Cheep Cherokee Part 8: Final Payoff

Today, we're taking our Chief Cherokee out to put it to the test. We're gonna be flexing, scrapping and having a little fun with our 88 XJ. It's all today here on trucks.

Hey, welcome to trucks. Well, today we got the cheap Cherokee out of the shop and we're gonna test out our new Rusty's Long arm suspension system and throw in some breaking miles on our 4.6 Stroker. And we decided to take a bit of a road trip and we ended up here at the Black Mountain off Road Park, which if you're looking for this place on the map, it's right next to Harlan Kentucky

and Black Mountains got over 6000 acres and about 200 plus miles of trails. So they should have something for everybody. Whether you're driving nearly stocked four by four, an Xtreme 4x4 style rock crawler.

There's something in between like our little XJ there.

Now, if you're trying to drag the family along, well, it might be a little bit easier to sell them on the idea, letting them know that they can do it like we did and stay in one of these Black Mountain cabin rentals comes with air conditioning, heat, a full bathroom, even a little mini fridge. Now, if you might have noticed,

well, we're getting a little bit of rain and the weather's not exactly cooperating, but, hey, it'll keep the mosquitoes away and the dust down.

While on our way to the trailhead, we run across every style and size of off road rig imaginable and one random pickup truck. So it doesn't matter what you bring, you can always find somebody to w with a black mountain.

Now, there are a couple of things that we've done that you haven't seen with the extra flex that we've got with the long arm system, we needed longer shocks. So we picked them up from Rusty's as well as we made these homemade limit straps out of some wore out tie downs we had kicking around. So this thing should be good to go.

Now with our slip yak Eliminator kit installed, we obviously needed a new drive shaft. So we went back to Denny's and picked up one of his four by four off road CV shafts. It's made with quality American made spicer U joints. It's tough. It should last a long time.

Now, with the taller lift tight up front, what we needed to match things up out back. So since we already had our Daystar coil spaces on the front springs, when we went back to Daystar and picked up some of their lift shackles, it'll give us the clearance we need

and it rotated the pin angle up a bit.

So

now we started out by taking it easy on one of the more moderate trails. Yes, this is a trail due to all the heavy rains in the past few days. Well, it turned every gravel road trail or just downward slope into a washout, but that just added to the difficulty and to the fun.

Now, since we've had our Cherokee out last, we've relocated our steering for extra ground clearance as well as upgraded the long arms for better front and flex. We've also added a couple of inches of clearance in between our bushwhacker flares and our 33 inch BFGS.

But most importantly with our Stroker complete, we now have a decent amount of horsepower and torque underneath our right foot.

That was a walk in the park and the Jeep's doing great. It's running cool right now. It's about 185 which is perfect and it's especially good for a fresh engine. So we're just gonna keep on going and rack some miles up.

Now, Black Mountain got its name because it used to be a strip mine, mining for coal and you better believe the local community absolutely supports the off road adventure area, a

little mud.

The people kept telling us how beautiful it was on the trails and up at the summit

and believe me, it kept on going and going and going. So we kept climbing

it, uh,

20 acres shy of being 8000 acres. About 200 miles of trail have some great views at the top. It goes up to elevations of about 3500 ft, have both A TV and truck trails. Everything from very easy to total extreme. Uh, we've made a few trails but most of them were just existing logging roads or coal roads.

Now, we knew coming up here we were gonna run into a few more rigs and Jeeps the trail. In fact, this one here used to be a Grand Cherokee. It used to look kind of like this one. We're here with the vehicle owner, Cam Simons. He's obviously been out on the trail already. He's also the event organizer for the Grand Slam Southeast Trail Ride cam. Tell me a little bit about your rink. Sure. It's a 94 Grand Cherokee started out as a two wheel drive and I put a down 30 front axle and 35 in

and, um,

had it lifted three inches on 30 ones and then it

went to 30 fives with, um,

uh, Dana 44 in the front

and a 48.8.

And then from there, I wheeled it maybe three or four years and then went to the

Wontons last year.

All right,

this is just your average, um,

4 L, uh,

designed by Jeep.

The only thing I've done to it is, uh, pulled the head off and poured it out at home with a dremel. And, um, you can see, I've got my hot pockets on there for lunch. So we're set there.

What started out as a Grand Cherokee event? Just quickly expanded. Yeah, it's actually got started, um,

by a couple of friends of mine in, uh, 2003

and was at Teco

originally

and has kind of, uh,

progress as his guys sell off their grands, uh, they bring new rigs. So everybody's invited and everybody's welcome regardless of the vehicle.

But uh we, we just try to

get as many grands out as possible and have a good time.

Now, we heard over the CB, this guy in the yellow TJ broke a rear axle shaft here on the rock garden.

If you remember back a couple of years ago with a YJ, we had a Dana 35 rear ending it, it broke it pretty easily. And that's the reason we swapped the Dana 35 out of our Blue Cherokee in favor of the stronger 48.8 inch rear axle.

Ok, Chris, you got some breakage. What happened?

I was an airplane in Lower Rock Garden and uh figured we'd come out here. He was gonna ride up the hill when I started up his heel, it was fun. So I backed up and hit it

and when this right, the left rear wheel got

in all this rock, it bound and snapped the sea cliff on the end of it is that a sock axle

with the spill cleaned up and the trail cleared. We just kept on wheeling

and some of these guys, well,

they were just showing off.

Yeah.

Now, take a look at this view. This is absolutely gorgeous. We're up here over 2000 ft and it reminds me of where I grew up in British Columbia.

And I gotta ask you who would not want to bring their family up here. Black Mountain off Road Adventure area.

Great place to wheel

up next. We'll try and conquer the Rock Garden. And later it's back to the chassis,

dyno to get our new horsepower and torque numbers. Stay tuned.

Hey, welcome back to trucks. Well, earlier today, we noticed a few of the more hardcore rigs in the group go through this lower Rock Garden without too much difficulty and we really wanted to give it a shot, but we wanted to make sure that our new suspension was working well and that our new engine was running cool. And now that we've established that well, we're hoping that our new 4.6 Stroker Long Arms and 33 inch mud terrains are enough to get us through this thing.

Now, we were running trails all day long on about 12 or 13 pounds of pressure in each tire.

And when airing down, it's a balance in between traction and ground clearance.

And if you drop the pressure too much, you risk rolling the tire off the

bed

and you can be dragging the underside of the jeep across more rocks more often.

Yeah,

the straight,

I think we're doing a little strength testing on Denny's drive shaft. So far. So good.

Good boy.

There you go.

Rock rail test.

I

heard my great pain behind. I hurt my feelings.

Now, when crawling a trail like this, sometimes it takes finesse. Sometimes it takes a little bit of wheel spin, especially in the mud covered trails typically found in the southeast.

Now, our long arm suspension was flexing great all day long and the extra clearance we gained with our steering upgrade was paying off big time.

Now, we were really happy with the way our little XJ performed considering most of the guys we followed up this trail were on taller tires and running heavier duty parts.

Yeah. Well, Rocket man, we're going everywhere. He's going on 35. I think you said rocking.

I get it.

No

fun.

Yeah, it was just bad.

Sorry. Yeah.

Ok.

Our Cherokee had just enough clearance to get through this trail. We were constantly hitting rocks, but we needed every bit of body protection we could get, especially as we approached the toughest obstacle on the trail

just slowly try to creep up it.

We're gonna hit this bump. We're gonna hit this camera matt.

Is it worth giving up the camera for the shot? Go for it, man.

There you go.

That was the right

All right. We're up now.

Keep going forward a little bit.

Oh,

you might make it up that rock.

Yeah. Keep going.

I

was that

w

that was too,

I back up and just bump it, that right rear tires just sitting still.

Now, this spot here is really the only time the rather weak Ford limited slip let us down. We really could have used a full locker in this situation,

but we made it out anyway.

Well, that's not too bad. 33 inch tires, a 46,

a little bit of spotting. We did. All right.

The best part about it. We didn't break anything

up next. It's an easy tool stand you can make from scrap metal and later, we'll see just how well we did with our 4.6 Stroker rebuild. Stay tuned.

Hey, welcome back to trucks. Kevin and I had a great time up in Kentucky. We even managed to bring our little Jeep here home in one piece. Now, if you guys get a chance, you need to check out Black Mountain, it is definitely worth the trip.

Now, a little while ago, we picked up a new model 32 tubing bender. We opted for the

hydraulic attachment to make things easier because that thing is capable of bending up to quarter wall two inch dom. It

sure would have come in handy when we were bending up the 3/16 thick rocker skids we installed on the Grand Cherokee we built,

that's pretty easy. It operates with the flip of a switch,

just the push of a button.

Now, that would have kept us from having to use a giant leverage to get the job done manually. Now, we also picked up one of JD Square's notch master to be notch.

The problem is we don't have a stand for it

yet.

Build on a budget truck projects that save you time and money.

So we're gonna make a stand using this gigantic brake drum that came off the back of our dodge. Now we're gonna make it with an interchangeable mount so we can throw our bench grinder on there as well. We've already made up a little pedestal mount for it.

The rest of it, let's just scrap tubing

and some flat plate.

Now, if you're gonna be welding to a break drum like we are, that's cast. Well, don't be afraid to really weld it solid

using a 40,000 thick cut off wheel. We picked up from Industrial Depot.

He cut a five or six inch slit in what's gonna be the top of our stand.

You'll see why in a minute.

And with the two welded in place, we just used a small piece of bar stock welded to a bulk and some scrap hardware

so we could interchange tools and have an easy way to clamp them in place.

Now, the way this homemade clamp works is simply by turning the tea handle So it pulls two halves of the tube together, clamping things in place.

And with that taken care of, we thought we'd throw the notch master in there and try it out.

And that way we could create a storage location for the tool or equipment that's not in use.

Now, the notch master works by simply clamping the tube in place and then using a hall saw to cut a notch into the tube

so we can mount it at an angle.

Now, projects like these are great for novice or first time welders because it's a lot better to start on something like this than it is on roll cages or critical suspension parts,

all

with nothing more than a scrap break drum, some tubing cut offs and hardware out of the junk drawer. And you can build yourself a mount for a tubing notch or a bench grinder or whatever else you can come up with to throw on top of this thing. And one of the best parts about it, these tools don't take up space on your bench top.

Hey, welcome back to trucks. Well, as well as our chief Cherokee performed off road. The number one question we keep getting asked is how much power does our budget? 4.6 Stroker put down to the wheels. Well, here's what we found out.

Now out on the street, the seat of the pants dyno told us we did pretty good and out on the trail. Well, it had all the power and torque we needed.

But the chassis dyno tells a little bit different story.

And when we put this 46 together, we wanted to do it on a budget. And that meant keeping our modifications and the money spent internal.

So we reuse the stock intake manifold, throttle body and exhaust manifold. Now, we knew they were gonna be restrictive. We just didn't know how much

and the di

gra shows this thing was breathing through a straw and running out of breath before 4000 RPM.

And even though 100 and 33 horsepower and 100 and 97 pound feet of torque isn't terrible considering drive train losses and our big heavy tires, we can do better.

Now, we've been driving this thing around wheeling it and making dyno Poles without any tuning whatsoever and I'm sure that wasn't helping and there's some power gains to be made there. Now, with every dollar we spend on this thing, we're getting farther and farther away of what we would consider a cheap Cherokee. But I guess that's just how Jeeps evolved. Sure has been the case with every Jeep I've owned. But anyway, here's our plan for improving power. So we went to Jessi NW Auto Records in Antelope California and picked up some used parts with the biggest piece being this 99 and up 4 L Jeep intake manifold. Now, back in 99 Jeep had to reengineer some things to meet tighter emission controls. And in the process, they lost a few ponies. So to regain some of those ponies back, they redesigned a freer flowing intake manifold. It should be a great upgrade for a larger displacement engine.

Now, we also picked up a larger throttle body from a 91 to 95 Cherokee along with a power steering pump and bracket to help complete the conversion.

Now, the only part that didn't come from the wrecking yard was this Edelbrock header with the T

tech coding and this will help the breathing on the exhaust side.

Now, hopefully the money we spent on these parts will help us meet the power goals. We originally set for our 46 Stroker. So the next time you see a little Cherokee, we're gonna have these parts swapped out, have it strapped to the

dyno,

see what kind of improvements we can make.

I grew up in Northwestern Canada and have been in the unfortunate situation of having diesel fuel freeze up and gel in the fuel lines in the vehicle. It's an expensive fix and it will stop you in your tracks with a few ounces of prevention that never needs to happen.

Now, heat and iso

heat work basically the same way that a Glycol based antifreeze does in your radiator, they intermix with water may be present in the fuel and they simply won't allow

that water to freeze. Now, the yellow heat is for gasoline engines, iso heat is for diesel and gas fuel lines. Now, they also help with cold starts in the winter. Now, each bottle treats up to 20 gallons of fuel. It won't hurt your catalytic converters and is safe for carburetors. And the manufacturer claims that it might even act as a little bit of a cleaning agent for fuel injectors and varnish deposits. So whether you pour it in before or after you fuel, the bottom line is a little bit of prevention.

Can go a long way.

Now, if you got any questions about this thing or anything else you saw on today's show, go to Power Blog, tv.com. Thanks for watching trucks. See you next week.