Time for some more updates:

14th December 2011:

A couple of hours of dune bashing after work - very pleasant.




I got sick of the inside filling up with sand, so whilst doing a couple of other jobs, I set to and made a DIY cabin filter. The material used is a synthetic wadding/padding used in clothes making and was a handily sized offcut that Mrs M had handy. I have seen people do this using the filter from a cooker hood but I reckon that it would block up with the sand we have here. The photos aren't great - the job was done after sunset, using electric light and taking pics with a mobile phone.

First I removed the wiper arms and scuttle panel. For all 800 owners, it's worth noting that the scuttle panel is rot-proof plastic, not badly painted steel! You can then see the pathetic grille used by Jeep - it wouldn't stop anything smaller than a marble.



With the grille removed, you can see the sand inside the plenum. It was about 2mm thick and was easily picked up by the blower. I had to remove all this, of course.



The wadding was roughly trimmed and fixed in place on the grille with cable ties before refitting the grille to the bulkhead. Scuttle and wipers back on and we're good to go.


It certainly seems to work well enough.

Other jobs done recently are fitting upgraded injectors (supposedly better power and economy although I've not really seen any difference), doing a better wiring job on the roof lights as well as fitting better lights and fitting a better stereo than the rubbish JVC unit that was in there. I've still got to finish off fitting those suspension bushes........

A few more updates:

I managed to get most of the front polybushes fitted last weekend - a bit of a job as you have to drill out the old rubber bushes and reuse the metal sleeves (that means burning out the remaining bits of rubber with a blowtorch!). Still, job done and the front end feels more secure now, and is quieter than with the old, worn out bushes. Of course, there's something else now - a worn balljoint on the track bar (which controls the axle's left/right movement) so that's another trip to the parts shop to come later. Whilst I had the front end in bits, I fitted new brake discs and pads and these make a significant difference - I think that the old pads may have been a bit glazed.




On the last off-road trip I managed to hit a rock and damage the rim of one of the alloy wheels. I didn't see this until I was doing the bushes, so happy co-incidence there! Ironically, the damage wasn't done whilst really off-road but whilst driving down a gatch track which had a few random lumps of limestone scattered around.


Being an alloy wheel I'm not comfortable with the idea of bashing it back into shape, so I took the opportunity to buy a good second hand set of 4 of these "GT" alloys from Tony (tintin) and that means that I'll swap my tyres over and use on of the original Jeep alloys as the spare. The picture isn't mine, it's just to show the type of wheel. By the way, I now have wider tyres - 255/70 x 15" Cooper Cobra GTs - which I got from Al Jameel tyres in Saniya (they're close to the Kia and Hyundai dealers). The price seemed good and I feel a lot happier on tyres that DON'T have cracked sidewalls!

However, I've now found a worn balljoint in the front trackbar so that will need to be changed. I've no idea how old the one on there is but a replacement was only AED140 from Al Ahlia in Sanayia and fitting it is easy enough. The old balljoint really looked ready to fail at any time.

Very nice, but you could do this in the blog section

great work there mate. It's fun working on ZJ's, very easy to work with if you have a good understand of basic car mechanics.

overdose wrote:Very nice, but you could do this in the blog section

I could but I don't like blogs!

What the forum could do with is an "Our Cars" section.

Good suggestion Richard..... will ask Ayoob et al, to look into it.

In the meantime, keep up the great work, it is an inspiration mate.... not interference!!

Just clicked over to 240,000km last night - it will soon be a quarter of a million, the way I'm going.



I just liked this view at my local ADNOC last night - just a blurred shot done with a mobile phone but the moon looked great


Tonight I got my "new" wheels fitted tonight (15" x 9" GTs) - a recent purchase from tintin. They give a slightly wider stance than the standard wheels, without looking silly. I'm very pleased with them.

I actually got round to washing and polishing it this weekend, as well as replacing the lower control arm bushes (front suspension) with polybushes. That would have been a quick job if some previous "mechanic" had not fitted one bush the wrong way around and left it only 2/3 installed - I love spending 2 hours undoing someone else's bodge before completing a 30 minute job!

I bought a Speedview headup display unit at Christmas because the speedo on my Jeep reads about 10% too fast. I could probably have fixed the speedo but I like gadgets and this was reasonably cheap. http://www.speedview.co/

Having checked out the wiring diagrams, I decided that the easiest way to run the wiring down to the Vehicle Speed Sensor (VSS) would be to drop it down through the transmission tunnel near the autobox shifter. For ease of access I decided to remove the centre console and then drilled a hole down through the transmission cover plate between the autobox shifter and the transfer box shifter. I pushed a wire through there to connect to the vehicle speed sensor output wire and used insulating tape to protect it from chafing (not shown).


I spliced my newly fitted wire into the VSS output, insulated it, taped it up and then used cable ties to secure it to the existing loom above the transmission, out of the way of the linkages and driveshafts.


Back inside, I removed the lower trim panel was removed (crosshead screws marked with yellow dots)


I placed the display unit on top of the dash and ran its connector lead down the gap between the dash and A-pillar and then through a convenient gap into the space below the dash.



The power leads were connected to the back of the cigarette lighter. The ignition was switched on and the display illuminated nicely.



I took a quick test drive to check that the system worked - and it did. My standard speedo over reads by 10% but interestingly enough, the Speedview unit appears to read correctly (ie. 80 on the speedo = 72 on the Speedview) - I'll cross-check it with the satnav when I get a chance. That tells me that the error is in the instrument or the Powertrain Control Module (ECU) that processes the VSS output rather than the sensor. The installation will be finished off in the next day or two because I ran out of time to secure the display unit to the dash or to fit the display screen to my windscreen. Pictures to follow.

All in all, it was reasonably straightforward and took a couple of hours - half of that time was spent on working out what to do, rather than doing it. I'm happy!

I wonder how good these are on sand........