Moving the Jeep (x3)

After the old drivetrain was removed and the new V8 was mounted, no further progress on the project was made.  The Jeep sat in the basement of my dad’s workshop in New Hampshire, collecting dust, as I finished up my college in Ohio.  The delay was primarily due to the fact that, half way through my Junior year, I met the girl that was to become my wife.  No regrets as far as marriage is concerned, but obligations and priorities definitely change when “real life” sets in!

The Jeep continued to wait patiently for me, out of harm’s way, in my dad’s shop until we bought our house in August 2005.  The 3-car garage left room for my Jeep in one bay while being able to run our business out of the other two bays.  Bob brought his trailer down and we spent the large part of a day getting the Jeep out of the workshop basement (a fair amount of brush had grown over the unused driveway in 5+ years) and securing it to his flatbed (remember, the V8 under the hood was only good for about 600 lbs of dead weight at this point), then hauling it over to our new house and dumping it into the garage. 

 

Even though the idea of moving the Jeep to our house was supposed to be so that I could work on it whenever I got a free minute (my parent’s house was half an hour away), it never happened.  The Jeep continued to sit patiently, sometimes buried for months at a time under piles of cardboard from our business.  The mortgage was tying us up financially, so I had nothing to spend on the project.  Besides, I had no time to spend on the project since I was filling any moment I could with odd jobs to keep the cashflow in the black.  That could only be kept up for so long, so we put the house on the market and made plans to rent a home in Central Maine in early 2008.  The idea was to continue our business in a different (less expensive) region, and in the off-time I could help Bob with his contracting business.

I drove my cargo trailer up to Maine with some personal effects, and drove Bob’s flatbed back down to load the Jeep on to. I didn’t take any pictures of this move (I was doing it on my own and was a bit preoccupied with pulling the Jeep onto the trailer with towstraps while keeping the unattached trailer stationary – come to think of it, pictures would have been quite comical!).  The Jeep stayed on the flatbed for the rest of the winter, then we dropped it between the garage and the barn for the duration of our stay in Maine.  We made plans to move back to Ohio after we got notice that the house we were renting was being foreclosed on.  Two Penske trucks, my wife’s Volvo and my truck and cargo trailer got almost everything we owned to Ohio… except for the Jeep.  We made arrangements to park it at the home of a friend in Maine that had enough land that the neighbors wouldn’t care about a non-functional vehicle being there (not that zoning means much in Central Maine anyway).  This was the third move for the non-powered Jeep on the flatbed, so we were getting the hang for loading and unloading it by now!  It stayed at the edge of Nathan’s yard from August 2008 until July 2009, when I took the family and spent a month in Maine helping Bob out with his business.  We brought the empty box trailer with us to haul the Jeep back to Ohio with.

Loading into the box trailer proved to be a bit more difficult than loading onto the flatbed… The first obstacle to overcome was that there was no way to use the truck to pull the Jeep up with the towstrap.  I decided to use a come-a-long, so I bolted an anchorpoint at the front of the trailer floor.  I laid some 2×8 planks down across the tailgate to help disperse the weight.  I realized fairly quickly that the come-a-long would be very slow, and would require blocking the Jeep every couple of feet while I adjusted the come-a-long cable.  Nathan was there to offer his assistance, so we came up with the brilliant idea to push the Jeep up into the trailer with his Ranger.  His front bumper didn’t line up with the Jeep’s back bumper, so he flipped around and backed up to the Jeep.  I jumped into the Jeep to steer it in and apply the brakes when we got the Jeep to where it needed to be in the trailer.  As we pushed it in slowly, the trailer was making all kinds of groaning noises that I’d never heard it make before.  It was a very close fit (within inches on the width) to get it in, but it made it.  As Nathan pulled away from the Jeep and down the tailgate, I heard a very loud snap.  Envisioning a broken trailer axle or worse, I climbed out of the window of the Jeep and across the hood to reach the side door of the trailer.  Turns out, his rear bumper caught one of the load cables attached to the spring on the tailgate when he was pulling away (“I thought I felt something holding me back a little” he told me afterward).  No big deal, replacing the cable is still on my list of things to do, it was just a relief that it wasn’t something much worse!

At the end of July 2009, we made the trek with the Jeep in tow from Maine to Ohio (thankful that diesel was not over $5 a gallon like it was the last time we made that trip with my truck and trailer and two 26′ Penske trucks!).  Due to zoning, I can’t have the trailer where I’m renting right now, so it’s parked on a commercial lot with my father-in-law’s two trailers until I find someplace better to keep it.  The home we’re renting also has only a one-car garage, and if we ever get it cleared out to the point where we can fit a vehicle in there, my wife’s Volvo is first in line!  So as long as we live where we’re at, the Jeep won’t be convenient to work on.  That doesn’t mean that I won’t try to find a way to work on it though!  Watch here for progress!