REDONE wrote:Nikkormat wrote: I don't see what all the ruckus is about.
The ruckus is because you're too smart and have too much experience to do something as dumb as replacing an obsolete gas guzzling turd with an even WEAKER obsolete gas guzzling turd. You know the saying "round peg in a square hole?" It's like that, only instead of wooden pegs, you're using different shapes of turds.
I don't like the "Slippery slope" logical fallacy, but it's real easy to see how this approach leads to your FSJ getting towed in the middle of a project when you're too broke to get it out of impound. You'll feel like a victim, but you'd only be a victim of your own decisions. Seriously, park that sucker and get a beater until you have the time and MONEY to screw around with it, college kid! You should be studying, not screwing around with Jeeps, anyways!
It is parked, way back in Colorado. After the whole engine debacle it was cheaper to throw the transmission I picked up in Ouray in the Cherokee and steal the fuel system I bought for the new engine away from that parts pile to get rid of the TBI. I threw the transmission in it, swapped it back to a carburetor and a mechanical fuel pump, drove it for a week, and then took it all the way up here.
Here's the deal, if the majority of you say it's a bad idea I'm not going to do it. If I didn't care about the groups opinion I wouldn't have asked. But I still think the whole cost concern is unfounded. Admittedly I didn't think of the driveshafts but I'd be starting from scratch with another 360, or spending $1500 at the very least to finish the stupid 401.
And due to some interesting developments this thing needs to be emissions compliant eventually. I may find myself in commiefornia dealing with all that fun. So I'm going to have to dump money into a Howell setup for that stupid yellow sticker. And then dump money into tuning the Howell setup because I just know it's not going to run right or have enough air flow to support the 401. Which means finding a 454 throttle body, buying an APU1, setting up a tuning laptop... and pulling my hair out for weeks until it runs good enough to not worry about.
The main reason for not doing the swap now (besides the cries of no from the group) is the whole smog thing. I'm pretty sure a smog referee would turn their nose up at a something with less cylinders and less pollution controls.
As for buying some other sort of hoopty, hell no. The path I've gone down I'm going to be living out of my car for a while doing temporary low paying jobs to build up experience before grad school; only some of which will have some sort of housing accommodation. Sometimes I'll be sleeping in the jeep, some times in a crappy travel trailer next to the jeep provided by some state agency, sometimes in the jeep way back in the sticks to be close to a study area, sometimes it'll be parked for a month while I camp back in somewhere un accessible. Don't get me wrong this isn't a complaint. This is exactly what I wanted. That sounds like good fun. But I don't want to be doing that all in some soulless Toyota. Or some van to give people that "he lives in a van down by the river" stigma. I want to do it in a full size Jeep.
I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't bought that stupid beat up Cherokee and ended up on this site. You all reminded me what a sense of community was. Do you think if I had bought a beat up 4 runner and shown up to the FJ summit I would have been welcomed into their fruity little club the same way? Heck no! I highly doubt that they or anybody else would have given me the same wrenching, wheeling, sitting around a campfire education that this group did. Without you guys I would have probably just kept going down the engineering path working my way towards a boring life behind a desk making other people's dreams become a reality. No offense to anyone doing that, I just think I wouldn't have been happy doing that forever. If I hadn't hooked up with this group I probably would have kept slogging through school regardless of my unrecoverable GPA and ended up in a situation where I couldn't get into college. Who knows where I would have gone from there. Likely nowhere fast.
I spent a long time trying to put into words how much the community here has helped me get where I am, happy and going somewhere I'm excited about, and how I wouldn't have met the people I've met outside of the community here without my FSJ's. But I couldn't. FSJ's are too big a part of my life to give it up. And I'm sure there will be more opportunities in the future I wouldn't have had without being in a FSJ.
Heck Wyatt probably wouldn't have rediscovered his childhood love of mines and mining without us jeeping back into the hills after you guys got me hooked on 4 wheeling.
I cut three paragraphs out of this that just got too sappy. I can only have one car for a long while in the near future and it will be a full size jeep. That may be stupid and irresponsible, but I'll be happy. Even if that means I'll have to spend $2600 dollars in gas to go on some grand Alaskan adventure.
Gabe, "reformed" Jeep hoarder.