How A Junky 200,000 Mile Jeep Wrangler YJ Became My Perfect Wedding Car

When I first arrived in California, I bought my dream Jeep Wrangler, a 1991 YJ. Smitten by the vehicle’s lack of rust, I paid a hefty $7,800 for the 188,000 mile machine despite its ratty looking interior, rough looking hard-top, broken heater and AC, and various other issues. Concerned I may have overpaid, I asked readers: “Did I Overpay For My Completely Rust-Free Jeep Wrangler YJ?” Fast forward over a year and, after having the vehicle professionally detailed for my wedding day last week, I’m convinced: No I did not. This Jeep YJ was an absolute bargain. Just look at how this machine transformed from Larry The Cable Guy into Pierce Brosnan.

When I bought my Jeep, I had no intention of making it my wedding car. In fact, just a couple of years ago, if you’d ask me whether I was going to get married, I’d have told you it was hopeless. Seriously, I’d gone almost a decade without a girlfriend; when your parents stop asking you about whether there are any girls in your life, you know things are bad.

But about a week ago was my wedding day, and I really, really wanted to have a special vehicle waiting for my bride and me at the base of the steps. And I didn’t want to borrow anything. Looking at my fleet of machines, there was only one vehicle even close enough to “decent” to even act as a possible wedding machine: My YJ. The issue was that it smelled like gas when coasting in gear, its interior was ripped and gross, and overall it just looked a little rough.

Here’s what the Jeep started out as about two years ago.

This Thing Was Rough Just A Couple Years Back

The Jeep had been dragged around the country by an RV (you can see the towing attachment points on the bumper), the unbearable California sun had chewed through pretty much all the paint on the hood, and the top was rough. Luckily, by the time I bought the Jeep, the previous owner had re-sprayed the hood in his garage. It actually looked decent:

The tires were rough and the tan roof was a bit faded, but overall the Jeep looked ok from the outside; it was a 15-footer:

The inside was rough. The steering wheel was missing its logo, the shift balls were hideous cue-balls, the driver’s seat was torn to bits, and the whole cabin was just filthy.

Ditching The Full Doors, Adding A Bench, Getting XPEL PPF

To recoup some of those $7.800, I decided to sell my hard-top and full-doors. The truth is, driving a hard-top Jeep Wrangler is completely pointless; if you’re going to deal with the practicality and noise sacrifices associated with a Jeep Wrangler, it’s gotta be convertible — otherwise you’re better off just buying a Jeep XJ or ZJ (and I have both already).

So I sold the hard top for $950 and the doors for $1,200. This brought my overall purchase price to $5,650. I picked up some new tires for about $400 and a bench off eBay for $140 shipped:

I did have to pay $250 to have my half-doors repainted (by the seller in his garage — again, this dude has skill!):

But the real game-changing moment was when I had my YJ paint-corrected and then XPEL PPF’d. Look at how nice the exterior looked!:

Here’s the thing, though: Even though the exterior looked shiny now, the vehicle still was far from wedding-vehicle ready. The interior was horrible, and I still had that gasoline smell problem.

2 Weeks Until The Wedding, And All I’d Done Was Reupholster A Seat

And I tried everything to fix the latter issue; I dropped the fuel tank, replaced the pump and vents and hoses and filter — and yet, the dang smell remained.

I waited until just a few weeks before my wedding to really get started on prepping the Jeep for wedding duty. I’d already replaced those horrid cue ball shifters, so the next step was to pay $225 to have the driver’s seat reupholstered. Of course, that cost didn’t factor in the $160 passenger’s seat I bought off eBay (I needed its fabric). So yeah, that was nearly $400 for a seat! I also grabbed a little Jeep logo from a junkyard steering wheel, and I think those two were a big improvement:

It definitely looks better than it did before, but nothing prepared me for what a $300 professional detailing job would do to this old machine.

The Last-Second $300 Professional Detail Was Worth Every Penny

This was a mobile detailing service, and they showed up two days before my wedding in a Nissan NV200 with a big cube of water strapped into the cargo area:

They cleaned the exterior, making it looked quite fresh:

But it’s the interior detail that blew my mind. How about some before-and-afters? Here’s before (and you can look at the dark interior photos I showed above):

And here’s after:

Ho-lee-crap! That looks like an almost showroom-condition interior! It’s mint! I mean, just compare that photo above to this!:

What a transformation!

Fixing The Fuel Problem

It was two days before my wedding, and though I had a minty-fresh Jeep at this point, things still smelled too much like gas. Since I’d already replaced the fuel pump/vents/hoses, and the hard-line from those hoses to the front of the Jeep were in good shape, I basically set out to replace everything ahead of those hard lines. This meant: The flex-hoses that go to the fuel rail, and the injectors from the fuel rail into the intake.

The fuel flex-hoses may not have been leaking, but they appeared to be in horrible shape:

As I couldn’t get a local shop to make me the hoses, and I didn’t want to just use hose-clamps on fittings, I dropped $180 on nylon fuel lines made by my favorite Michigan brake line/fuel line shop, Inline-Tube:

I also dropped another $180 on new fuel injectors:

And I parted ways with $16 for a new O2 Sensor.

And I let go of $12 for a fuel pressure regulator:

I’m kind of regretting writing this article, because I know I’m going to have to add all these numbers up, and then I’ll be shocked with how much I spent on this Jeep. But alas, it’s for my wedding!

This was the first time I’d ever replaced fuel injectors on a Jeep 4.0, and it was remarkably easy. Pop off the fuel rail, yank the injectors out of the intake (this part was a bit of a bear), but otherwise just remove a few retaining clips and start yanking injectors. Then replace with new ones.

Yanking out the old O2 sensor and slapping a new one into the exhaust downpipe was also quite trivial:

The amount of black carbon buildup on both that O2 sensor and the injectors, along with a rich condition OBD1 trouble-code, has me convinced that there was something going wrong with the combustion process.

In any case, before I knew it, I had new fuel lines, a new O2 sensor, and new fuel injectors, and the Jeep was running better than ever! The fuel smell-while-coasting issue took a little while to disappear entirely, but it did! Had I thrown the kitchen sink at the problem? Sure. Was this my most sophisticated diagnose/repair job? Definitely not. But it’s my wedding, and time was of the essence!

The Night Before The Wedding

The night before the wedding, my family and Elise (not her real name)’s family had a great welcome dinner at a local Mexican place. Then my brother Mike and I set out to decorate the Jeep. I was quite tired, and wanted to get some rest before the big day, but Mike insisted we stop by a Target. There was nothing there, so he suggested we go to a Michael’s. There, we found a nice string of white fake flowers, which, along with some real flowers we’d procured from Trader Joe’s, would act as the decoration for the now-shiny and mostly smell-free YJ.

I say “mostly,” because even though the gas-smell-while-driving was gone, I did smell something while working around the rear of the Jeep. I peeked underneath and saw little splashes of moisture on the chassis. Turns out, there were a few pinholes in my fuel filler vent hose:

I luckily had a spare fuel filler hose sitting around, so I swapped that out. While I did that, my best man started decorating the Jeep.

He also scrounged up some white paint (house paint) to fix up some rusty parts of the tailgate hinge, and he re-painted a bracket.

Here you can see how it was before:

And here it is after:

The next morning, the morning of the wedding, Mike and his wife arrived at the church early and installed the real flowers onto the vehicle, tying a big bouquet onto the hood and shoving a white flower into each of the spare tire’s spokes:

I really wish I could share the smile on Elise (not her real name)’s face as our friends cheered us on as we drove off in that immaculate Jeep YJ. It was the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.

That drive we took from the church to our wedding venue along the coast was unforgettable. The entire way, people cheered from the street, cars honked, and the sun shined almost as brightly as my new bride’s — Mrs. Tracy’s — smile.

 

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After spending over a grand prepping the Jeep for the wedding, I was probably back up to about the $7,800 I’d initially paid for the machine, but now the Jeep actually looked and drove like every penny of those 7,800 bucks. It was absolutely magnificent.