I RESCUED NOT 1 BUT 2 JEEP GRAND WAGONEERS FROM THE CAR CRUSHER

On today's episode of Watch Jericho, I saved not one, but two Jeep Grand Wagoneers from the crusher. Well, guys, we had the brilliant idea. Well, okay. Our brilliant idea stemmed from the fact that we thought these cars we were gonna pick up today were in a paved parking lot. But they are not. We didn't travel, but we didn't know how wet it was. What we are walking through is deep soup that you sink directly into. And as soon as we pulled in here with the truck to pick up the Jeeps, the entire parking lot was destroyed. Right? If we just had one more, we'd have a complete. All of these ruts right here are from the last like 30 seconds. All we had to do is drive in and the truck was instantly buried. No traction in this soup, fun fact. Just like walking on ice, when you walk in the mud, it's impossible to look manly. That's true. You have to spread out your pressure, right? So it's either that or fall. Yeah, there it goes. Ooh, brakes locked. Oh, there it goes. Front wheel wasn't moving there for a second. All right, that's Grand Wagoneer 1 with the V8. And this is Grand Wagoneer 2. And we just tried to air up both front tires and they will not even take air. I mean, they take it, but it goes away instantly. So I think the fact that the tires are split might have something to do with that. But let's check out the wags. Wow, these are cool, man. These are cool. What's the, 91. Nice. Power back window, trailer brake. Woo. This is the pinnacle of luxury, baby. Anyway, this is Grand Wag 2. And I kind of don't think we're gonna get this one out of here today. I think we might be just working on the gray one at first. What is going on, guys? I'm Watch Jericho, and today, like I said, we are here with the first of the two Jeep Grand Wagoneers that are gonna land here in this shop for me to save. Now, both of these were destined for the crusher. They haven't run in years. They were abandoned and the owner was like, just haul them off for scrap and we'll be done with this. But I didn't wanna do that because these things are very cool. Now, this is the original SJ Jeep Grand Wagoneer, and they made this thing absolutely forever. It is the truck that pioneered the SUV. And it's a full body-on-frame, like an old-school truck SUV, and they sold it originally. They called it a station wagon, but eventually, this station wagon is what morphed into today's SUV, as we know and love. And this thing is an absolute monster. It's actually very near the end of the production run. It is a 1990, and the other one is a 92, and they'll both be over here shortly, but the game plan here is to make them both run and drive again, so that we can go Grand Wagoneering around. This thing is incredibly cool. Factory woody, of course, and it doesn't help that all the plastic and stuff is pulling back after years out in the weather, but these things look great. Now, this should be power, right? I think everything in the Grand Wagoneer is power. This is very, very cool. Like I said, 1990, and it has options. The off-road guys adore these because they do have front and rear solid axles. I love them, because they have the greatest things on earth, like power electric back window here that rolls down, and then a tailgate that opens up. They've got full Jensen audio systems. They were the pinnacle of cars in 1990. It was tough to find something more loaded and more cool than this. Now, this one has probably seen better days like when it was new, but it still looks pretty cool, and I hope, I sure hope we can get this thing running. All right, let's hop inside this thing. So the first thing you're gonna see is it has power seats. It has power windows, and the mirror controls, well, unfortunately, the power mirror controls there are broken, but even cooler than the power windows, it's got wing windows as well, so you get everything you could ever want. It is a combination of all of the greatest options. Here's our rear window washer right there, fresh air vent. We've got our light controls, interior gauge dimmer right there, rear defrost, that's the power window on the rear right there. Cruise control, which was probably pretty cool in 1990. I think I left this thing in neutral when I pushed it in here. A pretty full complement of gauges. We're only missing a tag here. You know, coolant temp, oil pressure, gas, battery, and like I said, there's just no tag. Air conditioning, of course, an Optimus tape player from Radio Shack, yeah, baby. And then AccuSound by Jensen Speakers, and the door there. Upper center console with a digital compass, sick. That's what I'm talking about. And then that looks like some kind of light sensor there in the center. Huh, I didn't even notice the whole headliner was just ripped out. And 166,000 miles on the clock, there's a digital clock in the gauges right there. Let's get the hood open and see. I don't want to break that, but I think we made it. Thought the door switch was stuck, but it looks like it's okay. Jeep logos in the floor mat there. This still has the old AMC logo as well. These seats must have been wild back in the day. I mean, these seats are cool enough they would hold up today. And then of course, a ton of room in the back. The back of this thing is monstrous. And that back seat looks like it's pretty comfy. Let's hop in here and look under the hood. I think these have that old AMC like 390 VA, but I'm not actually sure what's in here. Woo, under the hood on this thing is not exactly what you would call a pretty sight. It is a little crusty. It's kind of funny, look at this. This is the positive battery cable. It's like eight gauge. And for some reason, the negative is two odd. What? But that's funny. It's probably a really, really good ground. And we've got a nice little like THHN house wiring ground right there or some, you know, commercial stranded wire. A little bit more right here connecting to the distribution for the entire truck. That's what goes right there. And the AC compressor's belt is missing. It looks like it's locked up, locked up tight. Hey, fan spins free. This is the 5.9 liter V8, 360 cubic inches here. Nice little fuel filter regulator going on right there. We got the Wix one. Vacuum lines cracked to the cruise control or the vacuum bubble right there, which also feeds over here to the cruise diaphragm. But let's see what happens when we put some power on this thing. Like what else would we do here? Dual washer fluid tanks, very cool. One for the rear, one for the front. Coolant overflows right here. They shoved a lot of stuff under the hood of this old grand wag. And we got a bunch more vacuum distribution over here. It looks like all the vacuum lines are kind of ruined and it looks like the ignition coil might not have power. We're gonna find out together here in a second, but maybe if we just shove that wire into the coil, we might get some spark. Who knows? We're just troubleshooting without even having a battery hooked up. So let's hook a battery up. Look at that, the moment I hooked a battery up to it, it came to life. So we've got the hazards flashing here and there's a bunch of noise inside. Oh, it's the buzzer, okay. Where's the hazard control on this thing? Usually it's on the top of the wheel. Ah, it's hiding. Okay, so now we just have the buzzer that makes like a digital synth sound. Digital clock though, I'm in love with that. And the other thing that's cool is I just found this four wheel drive selector hiding down there. All right, let's see what happens when we crank it. It turns, that's all that matters. Let's let it crank. Maybe we get oil pressure, then we can start chasing problems. Well, I was hoping we were gonna crank it and then see some oil pressure on the gauge there. That's why I let it crank so long, but we did not find oil pressure ever, which is a little unfortunate there. Sometimes the oil pressure gauge doesn't move till the engine starts up and sometimes obviously they're dummy gauges that just look for the closure on the oil pressure sender and then they just put the gauge in the middle. It's possible, but on this old stuff, they're typically real. I did check the oil on this thing, but just because you guys wanna see it, that looks perfect to me. I know it doesn't wanna focus, but brand new oil, brand new oil. It looks like they just changed it and I know it hasn't moved in years, so that's a good sign. Now if we can just get it back in here, this dipstick goes way back here on the engine and I can't quite see what I'm doing here. Well, it's time to start chasing down problems. So one problem's gonna be spark and the next problem's gonna be fuel. I assume everything else is gonna work pretty well. Obviously, that's a sketchy place to start with the assumption, but let's also start by measuring voltage here at the coil and seeing if we have anything because all of those wires look very bad. They're all cracked there. Could be a short. We could have a fuse blown. So ignition coil's looking suspect. Oh, look at that. There's a broken wire right there. I don't like that. And it goes to whatever that is. If we connect those, things might take off. Things might start running. Who knows? The old owner didn't exactly tell me how long they were sitting for. He just said a very long time. They've just been hauled from parking lot to parking lot for years now. So at least they were kind of moving, but they were always sitting outside and who knows how bad that's been. He said the mice got to them at 1.2, so I assume mice ate some of the wires and that's probably one of our big problems. You know, guys, we could troubleshoot really fast if I just sprayed some starting fluid in here. That's always the answer, as you know, but hey, let's see if we got 12 volts. Ooh, I don't know if I love 6.3 volts. That's less than ideal. And here we should have, weird, we got one volt on the other side, 1.6 volts on one side of the coil and six volts on the other, which may not be enough. Let's check that mystery wire here. It's actually a ground. It is a ground. It's just stuck on a screw right there. So I don't know if it needs to be grounded or what's going on there. Maybe we make that connection and see what happens to the coil. Ooh, look at that. It either got rubbed through or, ooh, look at that. All the spark plug wires have been chewed on. That's kind of interesting. Ooh, all the spark plug wires have been chewed on. Look at that. Well, I'm not finding another one of those tonight, but at the same time, does it even matter? I don't know if we have spark from the coil. So we have a lot of spark troubleshooting to do in here. I sure think that ground mattered. I hooked it up here and we had sparks the whole time. Sparks were jumping over the surface there when I grounded out that wire there. So let's see what happens now. Maybe it was the electric choke or something. Well, nothing yet, guys. The coil is heating up though, so we definitely do have coil power. Six volts or not, we've got power there. So let's start checking actual spark plug wires. We'll just pull one and put the inline spark tester here. Spark tester won't stay put, so we're gonna make it. All right, let's crank it, see what happens. Woo, guys, did you see that? We have spark. So I know the wiring might look really bad, but hey, having spark is better than where we were a second ago, that's for sure. Let's get the cover off of this thing and see what we're dealing with here, because it must be no fuel at this point. Now, this should be an old mechanical fuel pump. It looks like there's the steel fuel line that comes off of the front somewhere down in here. So with that said, a couple squirts of starting fluid, and this thing should run. Wow, that carb looks brand new. You guys see how clean that is? All right, let's shoot some starting fluid in here and see if she fires up, because I think it's gonna run. Guys, Jeeps and starting fluid, I don't get it. We're on a roll with Jeeps and starting fluid around these parts. All right, that should be enough. Let's see what happens here. Are you guys excited? I'm excited. It runs. It runs, it just needs fuel. There is one unfortunate thing going on here. I don't know if you guys noticed. The fuel gauge is 100% full, and that is less than ideal in every sense of the word. What if it's just full of junk, fuel, and water? Like, it's been sitting forever. Smells like fire. Now, we got it running though. That's why it smells like fire. It ran perfectly. Let's hit it again and see if we can make it run long enough to get the mechanical fuel pump going. Ooh. There we go. That's a lot of starting fluid. Horn works, I'm kind of surprised. You know, looking around in here, I'm not seeing a mechanical fuel pump, which has me a little bit worried. This might have an electric fuel pump that's just not working. I can see the fuel feed up. Oh, there's the pump. Okay, it's a mechanical pump. I can see it now. It's actually kind of on top of the engine. If you guys see that shiny brass right here, that is the mechanical fuel pump, which should be sucking some fuel out of there. And I don't see any reason that it wouldn't be working. So this must be the return. And this is to the carb right here. And I'm just going to assume, so many broken hoses. There are broken vacuum lines everywhere. So with that said, since we don't really need to worry about any of this, it's all broken. Let's unhook it all. Everything's unhooked. Pull the whole air cleaner out of here and see what's going on. Why don't we have any gas? Don't hear a squirt or anything. So the cool thing here is we only have one real problem to solve and that's put gas in it. It's got to run now or it's going to catch on fire. All right, I'm just going to climb in here and fill the float bowl up. And once we get there, I think we can make it run long enough to get the fuel pump to work. And if there's fuel in it, maybe the thing's just lying to us. It could be, you never know. All right, girl, run. I filled the float bowl up that time. It should have ran the entire time. But I found a lot more bad news while I was up there filling up the float bowl. Look at these spark plug wires. They're gone. The mice ate through the spark plug wires. Crazy. So we got a lot of work to do to make this thing fire on eight cylinders. It's only running on seven right now. It is funny though. It is running on this one because it starts up very nicely and then quits. So let's figure out fuel, figure out some spark plug wires. I just reached in here and yanked out this fuel filter. Cleanest fuel filter I've ever seen. Not a drop, not a single drop of fuel inside it. Not a drop out of any of the hoses. Here's our supply, of course. Return, carburetor, not even a drop. So we'll try to put more fuel into the carb and see what happens here. I'm sure it'll start running, but that'll get us to the point where we know this thing runs. It's not gonna get us to the point where we have eight cylinders because we gotta stop at O'Reilly's tomorrow, pick up a set of wires. But other than that, this is the answer to it all. Why is there zero fuel coming out of that fuel pump right there? All right, this whole hose is full of fuel. I bet it runs now. Let's see what happens. We should be able to hear the accelerator pump. I think we got some squirts out of there that time. Let's see. Come on. Carburetor fully gassed. The Grand Wagoneer still does not run. I thought spark was gonna be our biggest problem here, but it turns out it's the whole fuel system. So let's start with, well, the carburetor seems like it's gonna have to come off, obviously. We're not getting anything from the accelerator pump there, which is pretty critical. It's gonna need that to run eventually. One thing I wanna check is, is the tank full? So one thing you can sometimes do to cheat and check the tank is just blast into the return line here and see if you hear gurgles out of the tank in the back. So here we go. Kinda sounds like it's fully dry. All right, air gun seated a little better. Where's the filler on this thing? Over here. Okay. Well, return works. Smells like there's something in there. I can't tell if it's gas, but it smells like something. Underneath the Grand Wag here, the gas tank has a gigantic skid plate on it. And there's really no way to beat on the gas tank to see if it's full without removing that skid plate. So let's see if we can rock the whole thing. It doesn't sound like there's anything in there. When I rock the entire car, it sounds like the only fluids in this are the coolant reservoir in the front or the radiator. I don't hear a single thing in the back. So now I'm kinda thinking it's out of gas and the cinder's bad, which is very possible. It's very, very possible the old fuel tank cinder is shot. The second reason that I like to blow air back through the return on these is a lot of times the return sits in the fuel and you hear it bubbling. You don't just get a pressure buildup, you get like that. Blub, blub, blub, blub, blub. And it's a clear sign that you're still full of fuel. Kinda sounds like it's just out of fuel. And I don't wanna go replacing that fuel pump that looks like you have to pull the power steering pump off unless it's actually got fuel in it and it just isn't sucking or isn't pumping. But as soon as you turn it on, the fuel tank gauge goes to full, which is sketchy. But I don't have any gas here and I sure don't have any spark plug wires here. So that is where we're at on the Grand Wag. Grand Wag number one for the day. The gas I do have, I have like a couple, like two pints of very, very nasty, nasty old gas. I think this has been here. I think this is gas we took out of another car like two years ago almost. So I'm not gonna keep putting that in here. I was spraying that gas into the carb and it was running just fine. It'll start for a second on it. But you know, we want some nice, fresh fuel in this as we continue troubleshooting. And of course, we need to pick up spark plug wires. Tomorrow we'll hit up O'Reilly's, we'll hit up the gas station and we will keep chugging away on this old Jeep here. And it'll run on eight cylinders, which will be awesome. And then we can start going through the fuel system. And there's a chance this carburetor just needs pressure on it before it starts working right. There's a chance. Anyway, like I said, that is Grand Wagoneer number one that we are saving from the scrapyard and it runs in the very first video. We've got basically all of it figured out, just little things to finish up here like a carburetor rebuild. And I think we'll be moving once we get those plug wires on tomorrow too. So that is it for today, guys. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to head on over to shopwatchchairer.com for cool shirts just like this. And please like, share, subscribe, do whatever you wanna do. And I will talk to you next time. Look, I mostly just wanna go get in the shower. I'm absolutely covered in that bad gas and it stinks and it's burning the cuts on my hands like you wouldn't believe. But I'm happy with where we're at. That was a huge amount of progress. By the end of the day tomorrow, we might be driving this thing. So that would be super cool to go rip this around for the weekend. You know, I was expecting when they said mice ate it, I was expecting wiring harness rebuilds. But I mean, spark plug wires notwithstanding, it seems like it's just fuel. And there's also a good chance there's a hole in the fuel tank. I mean, it looked pretty crusty on the back end of it. So maybe it filled up with water and rotted out. So they could need a fuel tank too, which would be the worst news.