Thanks much for that wonderful answer. And now for your very interesting Jeep. It is both great and weak. Your 5.7 Hemi engine is one of the best modern high performance motors ever to grace production cars. Shall I get technical???

Mopar is the Part division of Chrylser corp and so many fans of the various brands of the family simply refer to themselves as Mopar fans. I personally own a '72 Plymouth Scamp that is great mechanically and looks like hell, needing a full resto one day, my pride and Joy '72 Dodge Dart and 3 Big Jeeps, not those puny Wranglers. Anyway, Mopar first designed the "Hemi Head" engines back in the late 1950's I believe on what is basically their small block platform. These were quite popular and came in many interesting configs with various intake manifolds and carb combinations. But the Big Momma of all Hemi's was the introduction in the 1960's of the Big Block, 426 Hemi.

The Hemi refers to the Head design for it is short for Hemispherical. With domed shaped head and properly routed in and out runners air can really flow and valve sizes can be increased. Furthermore, with the two valves on either side of the head one can place the spark plug in the center top of the head, combustion chamber. When combined with fairly high compression and a some what matching domed piston, one gets incredible amounts of air flow in and out of the chamber, an almost perfect flame front the radiates down in all directions leading to increased power via almost perfect and complete combustion.

There were problems in the 1970's with meeting other federal clean air standards that just couldn't be solved on older analog cars. Hemi's only really work well at a certain min. compression. but high compression has a bad side efect; Mainly NOX or oxides of Nitrogen which all you doctors should know is murder on soft tissues in the sinuses and the lungs. This is why there are now catalitic converters, yes they also break down the other stuff, but most importantly, NOX. In the early days of pollution controls, the way the first solved things on carburated cars was with "de-tuning" engines, and getting compression down.

But today with modern fuel injection combined with better tempature controls and aluminum heads we can again begin to increase compression while still controlling for nasty NOX. Your modern Hemi is an all new design, not based on any previous Mopar engine for the most part. You have two spark plugs per cylinder and most Hemi's are now even coming with the feature of turning off the fuel and spark to up to 4 of the eight cylinders to save gas and reduce emmissions when load demands are low, like cruising at steady speeds. And just as quickly with "fly by wire" throttle your Hemi can wake up and become a beast like it's forefathers if you dare to use the go peddle.

But the weak side of your Jeep is that probably because of idiots at the company's old German ownership, all the big Jeeps have been emasculated in terms of their front suspension. They wanted to market to stupid Ford Exploder owners and have now put a weak independent front suspension on the front of all the new big Jeeps. Which is a shame because on the WJ's the 2nd generation Grand Cherokees, that still had a solid axle front suspension, they borrowed tech from the off road crowd and used an innovative three link rear suspension that offers increadible amounts of travel while NOT transfering the annoying trackbar rock that most modern solid axle coil spring cars come with. Your 3rd generation grand and the Liberty (yuck) both have versions of this great rear suspension saddled with the weak independent one up front. Very strange and very sad.

Real off-roaders want two solid axles for a number of reasons. One they just can be lifted a whole lot easier. Two they actually work much better off road, and three they are always stronger. We own a 2000 WJ, 2nd generation Grand and if that car is not smooth enough for you to go get groceries in or to get grandma you must need preperation H or something. The real problem with the indi suspension besides being weak is that as a tire gets stuffed up into a fender well to trave over a rock lets say, is that it actually lowers the center of the car, your vunerable gears, our differential, back down towards the things you are trying very hard to avoid, like other rocks and tree stumps. Where as in a solid axle car, as that same wheel gets stuffed the whole axles assembly is traveling up and out of the way of other problems on the ground. Very simple. Real Jeeps have two solid axles.

So keep you Hemi for fun on the highway and at traffic lights. With the right 4WD system I bet its still a Jeep in that respect for your winter driving in Maine. Quarda Trac or Quadra Drive II? What we need to do is get you a slightly used solid axle Jeep as a 2nd car and trail toy. That is what we are doing with our old '98 that has 182K miles on it as it is now getting a bit rough to say the least. If I could only post pictures of the Christmas Jeep, Green with a red door, missing front bumper and rusting rocker panels. Now it is my go to hockey and trail toy. The first generation Grands are know as ZJ's and they are becoming quite popular to play in. You get a real Jeep with a great suspension and a few great engine choices and all the comforts of a Grand. This past summer I was wheelin' with the windows up to keep out the bugs and mud, stayin' cool as a cucumber. And did my son Adam have a blast..."Daddy we shot the hole, did you see that we really shot that hole". A hole so deep that it was almost 2-3 feet over our roof rack... The sun disappeared for a moment.

So how was that for technical??? Start searching the local paper for your first trail rig. Have a Good night....
Yawn.....

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