A Jeep is probably the worst financial move you could ever make, aside from simply lighting $100 bills on fire and flushing the ashes down the toilet. Don't expect to get wealthy from your Jeep investment. You'll end up putting way more cash into this account than you'll ever be able to withdraw. That is if you do it right. Think of your Jeep as an amusement park. It costs money to go to Disneyland and take a picture with Mickey Mouse, watch the light parade, have a few thrills on Space Mountain, the Matterhorn, and so on. But what do you really walk away with at the end of the day besides a splitting headache from all the screaming kids and a sick stomach from the $5 churros and $10 cheeseburgers? Entertainment and memories, of course!
This doesn't mean I think you should take a second or third mortgage on your house to build up the ultimate flatfender for the sake of fun. Heck, some of my best wheeling and road trips involved dilapidated junk Jeeps that barely ran or had a history of questionable reliability. Many of these Jeeps were barely (if even) street legal. Jp Magazine is sometimes accused of doing stories on nothing but expensive, one-off, rock rigs. Truth is, we've done way more budget builds than spendy projects, but some people tend to forget about them. Do you remember Verne Simons' flatfender, and the EFI conversion we did on the factory 134 L-head engine, and the junkyard disk brakes? Several low-buck YJ builds have graced the pages over the years, including Free Jeep, the '93 YJ that we didn't even pay for before we took it over the Rubicon and back, the 130,000-Mile YJ that was transformed into a trail rig in a driveway over the weekend, and Project GJ (Girl Jeep) that wasn't much more than a tune-up and a few bolt-on parts.
Not even our '01 project Wrangler Red is a money pit. It's extremely mild by today's standards. Sure, Red has a few trick parts and pieces, but just in the places we thought needed upgrades. Or how about the Panel Hack series involving the backyard butchery of a presumably rare '66 Jeep Panel Wagon. I bought the thing for $800, and most of its hard parts came straight from the junkyard. Budget Big Jeep (Hot Dog), the '73 J-2000 rolling on 49-inch tires, could have been similarly replicated for about $5,000. It certainly wasn't free, but it was pretty cheap for a near-monster truck on Rockwell axles. It was probably the least expensive entry in Four Wheeler's '05 Top Truck Challenge.
The $13 Jeep (Hatari! CJ-6), No-Lift TJ (35-inch tired, stock-height '98 Wrangler), and the $500 Finder Truck ('88 two-wheel-drive Comanche) are more recent low-buck Jp Magazine project vehicles. Pete Trasborg, Christian Hazel, and I all love to scour the junkyards to find old and greasy parts for new swaps and modifications. Nearly every project build, tech article, and weld bead is done right in our own driveways and garages, so they can be easily duplicated at home by anyone. I work out of a barn-like structure, Christian has a two-car garage and a long driveway, and Pete begs for driveway and curb space from his landlord. I believe it's safe to say we've had more budget projects than all of the other off-road magazines combined. That's the kind of building background all three of us came from before we worked here, and that's where our focus remains in these pages.
Of course it costs some amount of money to have fun. But the moment you realize and accept it, your Jeep becomes a sound investment for your future. Not the kind of investment where you get to retire early and make a bank-load of money when you sell your Jeep, but the kind of investment you'll appreciate when you're older. The kind you'll look back on and remember all the fun you've ever had with your Jeep, including the hard-to-get-to places you saw that may no longer exist, the great people you met, and maybe (if you're lucky) a few tales of how you fixed your broken Jeep with a book of matches, bailing wire, and bubble gum. Ultimately, no one ever sat on their death-bed wishing they had less fun. - John Cappa