1st Gen Lunchtable Thread - General Discussion

Miguel is gonna take that day off. He just doesn't know it yet

 

Tell this guy that he flipped his Jeep in front of my house last night.

 

Just an outdoorsman in general, that kind of place gets boring fast. If you have a busy day job in a city and can't get out much and don't care to get out maybe that's better. I dunno. I work to live, I don't live to work. So I need someplace I can easily escape daily bullshit when I'm off work, the PNW is good for that. I'd like to move even farther away from people but right now that's just not possible. Ideally I'd like to be in Montana

 

That's my little brother, he's 6'3. All those years I beat up on him and my mom promised me he'd be bigger than me someday...well, she was right

 

unfortunately i am slowly shrinking in my old age
i fear i do not have many fun times ahead of me if it gets worse

 

i calculated the drive on that from here
over 1300 miles!
i am confident my old-as-dirt Tacoma can trek that far
went 1000 miles from the unspeakable U.P. town back home across MN and through Dakotas with no issues other than strong winds for 100s of miles
plenty of wide open prairie flatlands to look at lol

at least Fargo was mildly interesting

 

Was he a boy name sue?

 

Thanks Adrian. That was a neat family project from 10 years ago. My two sons were in their early teens and really had no real experience working on cars. I grew up around garages in a family of mechanics, so car work is like a second nature to me. So I bought this old but low miles 1st gen Q45 from a friend to be a project car for the boys to learn about cars on. It needed new timing chain guides and I found it needed new injectors, knock sensors, and so on. Unbeknownst to me, when I bought it it was running on 7-cylinders due to a failing injector. After I refreshed it and got all all 8 cylinders running properly, the car turned into a hell cat.

It needed enough work to be a good family project car, yet it was a new style car with anti-lock brakes an ECU, TCU, FPCU, BCM, all of the computer stuff that you need to be aware of these days. I got a copy of the model Nissan diagnostic software and hand-held unit that would let us experiment with making temporary tuning adjustments to the ECU. Later I bought a tuned stage 2-3 ECU club member for it that added another 30 WHP. Then another club member gave me a Level10 transmission for it since he had converted his to be a 5-speed. Though I had to send the transmission back to Level10 for refresh it was quite reasonable in the end to get a racing transmission. When I bought the car, I thought it was going to be more like an old Buick than the V8 powered sedan with a Z32 suspension that it became. You can get into trouble fast in that car.

So the boys got off to a good start working on cars that has and will come in handy throughout their lives. It really came in handy and saved me a ton of money when they started driving and could do their repairs and suspension tuning work in addition to being able to help me with whatever project that we started.

Soon their friends from school started coming over and using compressed air and impact tools for work on their cars. For a couple of years, every Saturday, I would have a driveway full of their buddies cars with the air impact tools running. We sounded like a Firestone store on weekends. Oddly enough, the neighbors never complained about the noise.

My youngest took what he learned from me and auto body class at school and started doing light mechanic work at a local shop after school during his senior year and during summers. He could go to work for 3 hours an afternoon and make more money than working 6 hours (until 10 PM) in fast food. He would get home from work a little after 6 PM and have plenty of time do his home work. That gave him a good paying summer job while he was in college. I maintain contact with some of their buds who will drop by and lend a hand when I need it. One of their buddies is incredibly good at installing stereos. So whenever I need a stereo installed, he will drop by to help.

One thing that I did that really helped the boys learn about safe driving was to get them involved in SCCA racing drivers training programs as soon as they got their learners permits. They had been playing the Forza motorsport game for a while and knew how to react to the different cones and signals at the track.

SCCA let them have that AutoX experience in real life and learn the limits of how far car you can push a car before you start to 3-wheel or lose it on a turn.
So by the time they were driving on their own, they had gotten past the notion of trying to dangerous driving on the streets and respected and enjoyed doing it on the track.

That little bit of SCCA exposure before they officially started driving most likely saved me thousands in insurance (from tickets) and car damage.

Over the past 10 years we have built/restored eight cars. The process gets a little better and goes faster each time. The Tacoma is #8.

 

No, but I knew a guy in high school back in TX named Ashley. He was a huge football player and no one dared tease him about his name lol

 

Oh we were just going through the neighborhoods haha. I always clean it before going on the main roads.

 

what part of Chicago land were you in?
i have been through there a number of times, but its a huge area!

 

Was living in the city, not far from the huge park and six corners (Milwaukee, N Cicero, and whatever that other road is).

 

When you can't afford a Jeep Gladiator -

"It's still a Jeep Truck!"

 

I think the MJ Comanche is cool. I'd own one. They have a higher tow rating than 3rd gen Tacoma's even

 

This ones a 2wd though like my failrunner.

Had it been a 4wd I would make a cash offer to the customer that's in our dealership now.

 

They're even easier to swap to four-wheel drive than your truck

 

I bet; I was looking underneath at the front end/suspension.

That and being a "Jeep" platform, everything is made to come off easily.

I guess it'd be more about 'parts' availability but really, new/upgraded parts should go into this thing if it were to get turned into a crawler.

@Sperrunner you should buy it

 

The cool part you only need things from a totally common XJ. Any four-wheel drive XJ will have all the parts you need. We buy one of those in scrap condition for sub $800

 

1500$ delivered

 

This cum dump crushed a dogs skull today.

(dogs gonna live)