A few years ago I had a ‘99 TJ as my daily driver. I liked it well enough, but it was far too small for the wife and I, two monsters, a svelte 180 pound dog, AND camping gear. The hunt for a bigger vehicle was on. I’ve always been a fan of full-size Chebys (I’ve even owned a few of ‘em), but I didn’t want to go Suburban kinda big. I was pretty set on a 4-door wagon so a fullsize Blazer was out too. I really don’t like independent suspension (ride quality is for chumps), so the vast majority of SUVs were not even a consideration. The short list eventually ended up with three entries: early ‘90s FJ80 Land Cruiser, late ‘90s Land Rover Series I Disco, or an AMC Wagoneer. Scouring Craigslist and Autotrader turned up nearly nothing in my price range for months on end (I never saw a single Wagoneer at any price point), and the more reading I did, the more I started leaning toward the 80 series–mostly because I liked the way they look, and they have more internal room than a Disco. I test drove a couple at a used car dealership, but nothing gave me the warm fuzzies.

While I continued the search for my ideal 80 series, I kept coming across 60s as well and they started to grow on me. I really liked the idea of the 60’s manual transmission over the slush-box in the 80s. I test drove a couple, but they were priced way higher than I wanted to spend for the condition they were in, and every single one I drove had a terrible hesitation at part throttle. I’d nearly given up when I found a well-used (read poorly maintained and beat up) 60 on Craigslist. I went to take a look at it, and had to jump start it just to take it for a test drive. It had a less pronounced hesitation than all the other 60s I’d looked at, horrific death-wobble around 25 mph, and was the wrong color (don’t let the all the red fool you–I’m not a fan, red just seems to be what I always end up with), but I was smitten. I ended up picking it up for a steal at $750. Bonnie was mine.

  Bonnie day one  

I have done a LOT of very overdue maintenance on my 60 over the last nine years, and I keep finding more little things to fix. The only real upgrades I’ve done are a Saginaw steering pump swap and porting the steering box for a future (potential) hydro-steering install. Bonnie is my current go-to for hauling myself to work so I don’t imagine a lot more will be getting done any time soon, but I’d like to keep things from getting any worse.

It seems like Bonnie is nearly always leaking fluid of some kind. I had to replace the radiator a couple years ago after the original unit started misting everything in the engine bay, and I’ve replaced all the gaskets on the engine…twice. Up until a couple months ago, Bonnie was stuck in a state of partial disassembly for nearly a year while I focused on wrapping up my degree, but I finally got everything fixed.

  So sad  

It’s been a couple months since I put Bonnie back together, and ever since then I’ve been chasing a low power/stumbling/surging problem at just off idle. Messing with the initial timing has helped some, but I’m beginning to wonder if there may be something wrong somewhere in the miles of emissions related vacuum hoses, and I just noticed the oil cooler is dripping again. I’m starting to think I shoulda named this thing after Artax from the Neverending Story -_-