by "gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee" (gogmorgo)
Published 01/07/2017 at 12:41
by "gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee" (gogmorgo)
Published 01/07/2017 at 12:41
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STARS: 2
1. The MJ because Jeep pickup, duh. It’s my daily. 1991, 4x4 4.0/aw4, 523,000km, at least on the body and suspension.
2. ‘92 2-dr 4.0/5-speed 4x4 XJ. It needs some love to make it legal but she runs and drives great. Around 330,000km I think. Couldn’t pass it up for $700, was supposed to be a manual donor for the MJ but now I’m torn cause it’s so good...
3. 1996 Niva 1.7i. Barebones 4x4 at its best. 60,000km or thereabouts. Ranked below the XJ because it’s currently just a pile of parts that I haven’t driven for a while.
4. 1993 XJ Country, 4.0/aw4/np242. Around 240,000km when I scrapped it. I picked it up for $300 and the motor, trans, t-case and some other stuff lives on in the MJ.
Its, uhh... The one on the far right. Not many pictures of it. The KK was a work vehicle and I don’t remember why I had it home.
5. Umm... Yeah. I’ve never actually driven this one. 2003 KJ 2.5L,5-speed, 4x4. Insurance write-off auction. I pulled the rear axle out which hopefully will end up under the MJ soon, once I get a Dana30 set up with a matching ratio. Then my landlord made me get rid of it so I couldn’t part it out further and recoup some cost.
"BJ" (benjamin-bignell)
01/07/2017 at 13:08, STARS: 0
Remind us: did you import your Lada or buy it used here? I would love to have one but they’re not terribly common in Canada - and especially in Quebec where everything rusts to death...
"gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee" (gogmorgo)
01/07/2017 at 14:39, STARS: 2
I bought it here a couple years ago. It’s a Canadian market model. Picked it up off a kid in Winnipeg, wishing I’d waited a bit longer cause just afterwards a much better one came up for the same asking price, owned by an enthusiast, not a joyrider. Ah well.
They’re still around. I’ve got an alert on Kijiji for them, mostly looking for curiosity’s sake any more. They come up every so often, seems to be a bigger concentration in Alberta and BC, particularly the Edmonton and Calgary areas, and the Kootenays, but they come up pretty frequently in south/central Ontario and New Brunswick/Nova Scotia too. Occasionally I’ll see one in Québec as well, but from my perusing of the various online networks it seems like they’ve got a pretty strong (albeit fairly tiny) community out there that has snatched most of them up and doesn’t let go so easily. But the ads don’t stay up long anywhere. But it seems like they’re much easier to find when you already have one, haha.
In what was probably one of the sketchier experiences of my life I once had a blacked-out Passat wagon whip a u-turn behind me on a major street going through one of the not-so-great areas of Saskatoon at 1 or 2:00 am and then stay glued behind me for long enough that I was getting pretty uncomfortable, so after they followed me onto Circle Drive and off at my exit, and then down my street, I turned into the maze of alleyways behind my house and hammered the gas, trying to loose them... it didn’t work, the Niva just didn’t have enough horsepower to outrun the Passat, and whoever was driving obviously didn’t care enough about it not to be doing 70 or 80 km/h down dark muddy back lanes to stay on me. So I pull into a strip mall and stop in front of a bank (because cameras I hope) and sit there, engine running, in gear, with my foot on the clutch, while these massive skinheads hop out of the VW and come running up to my window and start talking to me in super thick accents. Eventually I figure out that they’re Romanian, and they used to rally Nivas back home, and they want to buy mine. When I tell them I’m not interested in selling, they say they have five of them running and driving and a shit-ton of parts they’d sell me if I need anything (I mentioned brakes and some other things I think) and they gave me a business card, thanked me for the wonderful chase, and disappeared into the night. I unfortunately was moving a couple weeks later and didn’t have time to contact them, and misplaced the card in the move. They seemed like decent guys too, at least once my heart rate had slowed down a bit.
But I’ve actually had people come up to me at gas stations pretty frequently and ask me where if I can find parts, or tell me about the one they used to have, or on one occasion offer to sell me another (which I had to pass up because I’d pretty much just put the last of my money into the fuel tank). Owning a Niva is definitely a great way to meet the weirdest people.
Wow that was more than I intended to write, haha. I dug through some of the more recent Niva listings I’d got, 20 or so going back to November, but all the ads are down. I sometimes post some of the ads to Oppo cause I know there are some interested people out there, but I’ll try to make a better effort of it.