Pics of Pepe

Some pics of Pepe and areas where awesomeness needs to be reestablished:

Oxidized Paint. I'm thinking about painting the whole hood with some DIY bedliner. I've seen some good looking jeeps with bed liner on various bits of the exterior instead of normal paint. Haven't decided yet. Oxidized paint is definitely not awesome though.

Rust around the window frame. I actually did a bit of a short term fix already. Will do some pics and maybe a post of my fix soon.

 

More rust. Some matching rust on the right fender as well. I don't know if i'll cut out the rust and slap a crappy looking patch on or replace the front part of the fenders. Rust is not awesome. I think the plan for now is to ignore it.

Pepe gets some new shoes

After several hours of research I settled on a set of retreaded tires from www.treadwright.com. There's some obvious drawbacks to retreaded tires and its much too soon to say if the cost savings outweigh the shortcomings. Although not my first pick, I decided to try their 235/75 R15 (29") Crawler M/Ts. Cost was $87.00 a tire and shipping was around $75. Not too bad for a set of offroad tires. Several of their tires were on backorder so if you have any intent of ordering from them you may want to order several weeks to months in advance of actually needing them.

Just a side note here for anyone else besides me who is confused by the gibberish of numbers and letters designating a tires size. Tires are often identified by three numbers, using the above 235/75 R15 tire as an example the first number 235 designates the width the tire in millimeters. The second number 75 designates the height of the sidewall of the tire as a percentage of the width. In this case 75% of the width of 235 is .75*235mm=176mm. Therefore the sidewall height is 176 mm. The last number R15 is the inner diameter of the tire and the diameter of the rim in inches, in this case 15 inches with "R" designating the tire as a radial tire. So stupid.

The tires arrived within a week of placing my order and looked great. The casings (the portion of the tire that is reused on retreads) were matching, and looked defect free, no patches, plugs, etc. The tread of the tire itself looked fairly aggressive and had over 1/2" deep well spaced lugs.
 
Once mounted I immediately noticed there is some road noise that accompanied these tires. It begins as a low whir but as you accelerate up to highway speed it transitions into a noise that sounds a bit like a small jet taking off. It doesn't bother me..yet.

I only have one offroad test with them but as expected they do better then the four bald Pirellis they replaced. So thats good. I'll do some more "testing" later. For science.

I'm going to try and stay vigilante and take note on how the tires wear and offroad performance. So further "testing" will be required periodically.

Bringing Pepe Home!

This is Pepe. (The jeep not the dog).

The woman who sold us the jeep had adopted the name from "Romancing the Stone", and it had been her Pepe for the last decade or so. She seemed quite concerned that we take good care of her Pepe for her. We thought he looked like a Pepe too.

Pepe is a 1995 Jeep Wrangler YJ with a 4 cylinder engine and manual transmission. Hes a bit rough around the edges: rust around the window frame and both front fenders, the paint is very badly oxidized across the hood, all four tires are bald and I'd rather walk through a blizzard then risk running the badly cracking spare, the right turn signal once engaged will not stop blinking until the car is turned off, the steering wheel vibrates between 28 and 35 mph and then again at any speed above 50, and there are no fewer then four distinct rattles that can be heard while cruising down the highway. Despite his problems Pepe now belonged to us, and he would be our Jeep.

The intent of this website is to document Pepe's maintenance, awesomeification and travels.