PHOENIX RISEN

Buying an old Grand Cherokee you’ve seen abandoned in a field is a brave thing to do. But as the saying goes, fortune favours the brave – and just when Stephan van Niekerk’s Jeep was looking like a goner, he was blessed by a turn of events that saw it truck rise like a phoenix from the flames

Words and pictures: Alan Kidd

Rescuing and restoring an old 4x4 that someone else has neglected can be a great way of getting your hands on an otherwise unattainable vehicle. If you’ve got the skills, the inclination, the time, the money and the equipment, the potential certainly is there to turn someone else’s trash into treasure.

Normally, it’ll be something with a Land Rover badge. Normally, but by means always. If you were to find an old Willys MB mouldering away in the corner of a farmyard, for example, you could certainly make something very special out of that.

But an old, unloved Grand Cherokee? That’s pushing it. An old, unloved Grand Cherokee whose previous owner used it for towing dead tractors around the place? Crikey.

You’d need to be brave to take a punt on such a thing. But Stephan van Niekerk is definitely brave – to a degree few of us can imagine, actually, having put it all on the line in Afghanistan – and

The WJ-era Grand Cherokee was a capable bit of kit, but it’s not exactly immune from bringing pain into its owners’ lives. At least Stephan’s is powered by the 2.7 CRD engine, which has proved a lot more reliable than the older 3.1 diesel. The engine is basically unchanged, but the same can’t be said for the suspension. Here, Eddie Priscott from Allmakes ordered up an aftermarket kit from a Jeep specialist which proceeded to send him one that didn’t fit; the springs and shocks you see here are Allmakes’ own, and they give the truck enough lift for it to wear a set of 32-inchers (255/75R17s, since you ask) with pride having seen a decrepit WJ abandoned in a field near his home just outside Taunton, he did a deal with the farmer and brought it home.

As they say, fortune favours the brave. But as they also say, discretion is the better part of valour. And Stephan was doubly brave because he actually bought not one but two WJs, the second of them costing him a not very reassuringly expensive £200, with the idea of building one good one out of the pair of them.

There’s a chance that instead, he ended up with twice the headaches. But here’s where fortune came in to favour him for his bravery.

His friend Ian knows about cars. And like many people who know about cars, he’s s serial watcher of shows like Car SOS. And, seeing the plight of Stephan’s Jeeps, he had an idea.

Next thing you know, a plot has been hatched. Stephan takes up the story: ‘One of the Jeeps had turned out to be in better condition, so I was sticking with it. A friend of mine had said he was interested in the other one, then one weekend I had been away in Nottingham and while I was on the way home, my wife phoned to say he had been round and bought it. So I thought no problems, it’s a mate, all done.

‘Then my mechanic told me he had sent my Jeep away to get the PCB done. That meant there were valid reasons for them both disappearing, so I never smelt a rat.’

If you’re into these shows, by the time you read this you may well have seen the episode in which the Car SOS team transform what was a fairly knackered looking Grand Cherokee into the cool tool you see in these pictures. But just how knackered was it?

‘If you weighed up the cost of getting a workshop to put it back on the road, it would have been a scrapper,’ says Eddie Priscott of Allmakes 4x4, who the production team got on board to help make the project happen. They wanted to create a Jeep that would make a statement, as well as doing the job Stephan wanted which was to take his kids on green laning adventures.

By now, it was obvious that getting parts for the vehicle was going to be a big issue. Stephan’s Jeep had the later 2.7 CRD diesel engine but, as Eddie explains, US suppliers only cater for petrol models. Go looking for Grand Cherokees in scrapyards, meanwhile, and you’ll find plenty – but all with the same bits already broken.

Sand ladders, a high-lift and a spare wheel are typical residents of a slimline roof rack. Stephan has had thoughts of taking the Jeep to Africa, so they might be making way for a tent at some stage. Either way, the Hella light bar is the one thing on here you can be sure will be used most frequently

On top of this, the truck was rusty. Well, it had been abandoned in a field. How rusty? Eddie says he found that five out of the six potential mounting points for rock sliders were rotten, so that’s a very. ‘It needed loads and loads of welding underneath,’ he says. ‘The floors were terrible, and we spent four days just on the arches.’

By the time Eddie first saw the vehicle, it was already in bits. It was minus its bumpers and lights, and Car SOS had taken away the axles to have them rebuilt. The plan was also to restore the steering and suspension, but beyond that there was a lot of talk about the direction the project should take. A roll cage and bucket seats were proposed – however with Stephan being a double leg amputee, getting into them would be a struggle, so they decided to scale it back on that score. Oh, and no roll cage was available for the vehicle anyway. If you’re used to going shopping for Defender parts, you’ll be starting to get an idea of the problem the team had taken on.

Eventually, anyway, the team settled on doing a build along the lines of the Grand Cherokees people do in the US. Not the ultra-spec rock crawlers you see at the top of the game, but the sort of trail motors an enthusiast might put together for trips out to Moab and the Rubicon.

For this, a +4” long-arm kit from Rough Country sounds pretty much ideal. So Eddie ordered one up… then it arrived, and the arms didn’t fit. Eddie says he thinks the kit he received was for a Wrangler. As if they weren’t finding it hard enough to get parts. A quick look under the vehicle will show Terrafirma’s own logo on the shocks, which sounds like a classic case of it you want something doing…

You might assue that a massive company like Terrafirma will be able to wave a magic wand and make anything happen, but listen to Eddie talking about how he brought his part of the project together and it will become very clear that this was not some big corporate exercise in throwing TV money at the problem. The bumper, for example, he sourced on eBay. From eBay, and in Poland.

The roof rack, too, came from the same site, thanks to a seller who had made one once and kept the drawings. But then it arrived, and guess what? ‘The 90-degree folds were more like 100 degrees,’ laments Eddie. ‘I had to take it to a fabricator I use, to have them put right. Only after that, we had it powder-coated.’

We mentioned the mounting points for the rock sliders earlier on, and of course before anything could be added the galloping rust had to be replaced with good metal. Having done that, Eddie took a set of his own Terrafirma units, intended for life aboard a Discovery, and remanufactured them to fit. Once again this is an illustration of the real-world nature of the project.

As for the snorkel, the one that ended up on the vehicle was the third that Eddie had bought for it. Even then, it was about as straightforward as trying to juggle chickens.

The actual snorkel they ended up using was intended for a 2.4-litre Toyota Hilux. Obviously. But that’s just the beginning. ‘The cold air inlet to the filter is behind the headlight,’ Eddie explains. ‘So you would need to do a whole new air box. Also, the inner and outer wing skins are only about one inch apart – and the inner wing is structural, and where you’d need to go through it is close to the suspension turret.

‘You could make it work, but it would take about two days. So the snorkel is a dummy.’ They do say that television is all smoke and mirrors, but actually this is just about the only thing about the Jeep that’s not what it seems.

That bumper has a Terrafirma winch on it, for example, and the company also did the wiring (and there was a lot of it) for the Hella LEDs adorning the truck’s bumper and rood rack.

It all goes together to make a Grand Cherokee that looks cool, purposeful and also pleasingly honest. We’ve seen these subjected to unbelievably big-budget builds, and the results can be spec-

Rock sliders are fine things, but they’re not normally as remarkable as they are on this Grand Cherokee. When Eddie examined the Jeep, he found that five out of the six potential mounting points were completely rotten – one of several areas in which the project turned out to require a staggering amount of welding tacular – if not any more effective off-road than spending half as much on a standard Wrangler. Not that you want to be the guy with the bucket of cold water, because there’s no such thing as a bad project – but anyway, Stephan’s Jeep is an eye-catcher and an off-roader in equal measure, without either aspect of its character overwhelming the other.

A perfect example of this is the finish, was was done by the guys at Raptor. You know the stuff –a textured coating that’s verging on indestructible, developed with spray-in pick-up bedliners in mind but now increasingly popular as an alternative to traditional paint. It’s tintable, which of course means there are endless creative opportunities with it, and once your truck has a coat of it in place you can drive down all the scratchy green lanes in the world and brush rash will be a thing of the past. It’s on the Grand’s body panels, wheelarch extensions and grille… then when you pop the bonnet you’ll find it on the air box and engine cover too, with all the different elements going together to create a cool two-tone look.

And talking of cool things, one day a while after the two Jeeps disappeared, Stephan was away on a mountain biking event with his friends. It’s a passion of his, and something he does to raise money for other wounded veterans (next year, he’s going to be cycling from Canada to Mexico via the entire length of the Rockies, which is a hell of an undertaking by anybody’s standards, in aid of the Adaptive Grand Slam charity). There was a film crew there watching the action, which apparently didn’t come across as being out of the ordinary, but then all of a sudden the whole scene turned into the Big Reveal, with the Car SOS guys appearing out of nowhere along with his Grand Cherokee – unrecognisable from the sad state it was in when he last saw it, and all ready to hit the lanes for those adventures with his family.

Having been medically discharged from the Army, Stephan has built a new life in which he mixes his fundraising with work as a motivational speaker, among other things encouraging people to be willing to seek help. Few things could be more motivational than his own story of positive thinking in the face of the unthinkable – and, while it’s hardly on the same scale, that’s kind of mirrored in its own way by his Jeep’s new life. In its own small way, this Grand Cherokee represents a refusal to accept defeat – and the importance of knowing when to send out an SOS.