Jurassic Park Jeep Project
Making a Jurassic Park Jeep was something I'd wanted to do for a significant chunk of my life but always felt kind of silly about it, so I considered it a mere pipe dream. I made do with TJs (1997-2006 Wranglers) instead; though I always kept an eye out for a decent YJ for sale... just in case.
Many years later, making Jurassic Park Jeep replicas became oddly popular, relatively speaking. (See Jurassic Park Motor Pool.) Seeing all these new builds increased the itch to dangerous levels. I decided it was time to be silly. I became a little more aggressive in my search for a suitable '92-'94 Wrangler Sahara. The first one I thought was worth going to look at was a couple hours from me. I went to check it out. It looked all right, but the motor sounded like a diesel (spoiler alert: it was a stock, gasoline 4.0L). The owner seemed to think I was nuts for being apprehensive about how loud it was. It sounded like someone left their 1/2" socket last time they were in there. I passed on that one. The scouring of craigslist continued, but very little looked promising for a long time.
At last, on March 1st, 2017 I found and purchased a 1993 Jeep YJ¹ Sahara hard top with manual transmission. It had to be manual! That's what was visibly used in the movie, I dislike column shifters, and I just wanted to own a manual. All the TJs I've ever had were automatic.
¹ "YJ" is Canadian for "Wrangler".
Anyway, this was the one to become JP30!
"Ah, that should be easy. It's just same paint, right?!"
[Laughs in automotive restoration]
The base vehicle wasn't in fantastic shape when I got it. The motor seemed sound, but the transmission was noisy, an AC hose had rotted so the system was completely empty, the radiator was leaking, and, being a northern vehicle, it particularly suffered from the bane of any old Jeep's existence: ｒｕｓｔ. Overall the rust isn't too bad, but there are certain acute areas of it.
These are the voyages of the Jurassic Park Jeep Project. A [redacted] year mission to boldly restore and build what I've never restored and built before.
I did not keep a journal of my progress, so what I've done in each area up to the time of this publishing will be written as stories from memory, but I intend to make smaller and more frequent progress reports henceforth.
The leaky AC hose seemed like the easiest fix, so I started there. Oh, but this thing is so old it used R-12 refrigerant which is difficult to come by these days. So I decided I'd convert it to R-134a since that was just a matter of replacing some parts. That eventually turned into replacing some more parts since it ended up being easier to twist the hard lines on the condenser in two than it was to disconnect the hoses from them. I ended up replacing the entire air conditioning system except the compressor and the evaporator. What an adventure! It worked in the end though, but you can hear the compressor running from inside the cabin! It doesn't inspire confidence.
With work on the AC completed, it was time for a new radiator. Having struggled with a non-working, non-Mopar radiator on my TJ in the past, I decided to skip the whole "not Mopar" thing entirely and use a Mopar. Unfortunately, it proved impossible (at least at the time) to source a new Mopar YJ radiator, so I ended up getting a TJ radiator (supply for which also seemed to be drying up—that was a painful purchase) and modifying it to fit. The only necessary modification ended up being an extra bolt hole. The fan shroud, however, only got three out of four bolts because the TJ radiator's flange is a different shape (pretty much only in that area) and doesn't actually provide any metal where that fourth fan shroud bolt goes. It ended up being pretty solid without it though.
All the while I was on a quest to find the most screen-accurate parts I could. This was a constant search on craigslist and eBay for the parts. Unfortunately around this time scalpers started catching onto the JP Jeep craze. The KC fog lights that are nearly identical to the screen-used lights started being listed for hundreds of dollars. Luckily for me I had managed to get some for about $30 a few years before along with the Radio Shack CB ball mount before they went out of business.