Hey all!
Made a thread to start posting the progress of the rebuild.
Background: We were given a 99 sport back in 2020 by my dad’s best friend. His Jeep was a staple of his personality. Unfortunately, he let things go and the frame was complete junk along with the tub being pretty bad as well, but the engine only had 90k miles along with the title. Originally, we thought about putting the engine in my dad’s yellow Jeep we bought in 2021 that had a blown 2.4, but he decided a 2.4 swap was easier. We eventually found a 99 Sahara locally in the fall of 2023 that was used as a field car and had no title, the perfect setup for what we needed, or so we thought. Unfortunately, when we bought it, it was cold and at night, so our inspection was not very thorough. The frame ended up being pretty much rotted out from the inside on both sides from rear to front control arms… yikes! I ended up finding a roller locally in late spring or 2024, which was advertised as rot free. During my inspection I only found surface rust so we ended up getting it. When we got it home and stripped it down we ended up finding a hole rotted through that was hidden by the skid plate. Dude was a dbag and said he sold it “as is” (which wasn’t true), and we ended up deciding to just move on and not bother taking him to court. This put a damper on things, and with my dad’s and my work schedule, it sat almost for a full year until February 2025.
Being that I got laid off back in November, I had some free time so I pulled the thing in garage and started tackling all the prep work for getting this project going!
Made a thread to start posting the progress of the rebuild.
Background: We were given a 99 sport back in 2020 by my dad’s best friend. His Jeep was a staple of his personality. Unfortunately, he let things go and the frame was complete junk along with the tub being pretty bad as well, but the engine only had 90k miles along with the title. Originally, we thought about putting the engine in my dad’s yellow Jeep we bought in 2021 that had a blown 2.4, but he decided a 2.4 swap was easier. We eventually found a 99 Sahara locally in the fall of 2023 that was used as a field car and had no title, the perfect setup for what we needed, or so we thought. Unfortunately, when we bought it, it was cold and at night, so our inspection was not very thorough. The frame ended up being pretty much rotted out from the inside on both sides from rear to front control arms… yikes! I ended up finding a roller locally in late spring or 2024, which was advertised as rot free. During my inspection I only found surface rust so we ended up getting it. When we got it home and stripped it down we ended up finding a hole rotted through that was hidden by the skid plate. Dude was a dbag and said he sold it “as is” (which wasn’t true), and we ended up deciding to just move on and not bother taking him to court. This put a damper on things, and with my dad’s and my work schedule, it sat almost for a full year until February 2025.
Being that I got laid off back in November, I had some free time so I pulled the thing in garage and started tackling all the prep work for getting this project going!
