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So Long Old Friend – Sending the Mighty Merc to its new home.

Well I was kind of hoping this day wouldn’t come but……

1st time its ever been on a trailer..

…. there she goes.

Over the past 4 years since it was built it saw, 11 Off Road trips, 3 trips to Colorado and Utah, and countless weekend trips exploring various back roads in IL and MO.  But it was time for it to go for multiple reasons, none of which were the trucks fault.  We’ll just chalk those reasons to “Being an adult”.  While I hope to not be done playing off road, it’ll be several months before I can even think about starting another build(s).  And it feels dang weird to not have a wheeling rig in the fleet for the first time in 14 years.

“Adulting” isn’t always fun, and this was one of the harder automotive decisions I’ve had to make in a while.  But that’s life.

Typically when I sell a rig, I like to do a little recap of what worked and what didn’t, but there isn’t much to say on the negative side other than the fuel mileage wasn’t great.  But it was a big heavy rig that had a small block spinning at 2,600 rpm on the highway so that isn’t really surprising.  Overall, the thing really just worked in all the situations I asked it too while conveying our family in comfort to our various adventures.

The biggest hang up I ran into was the manual swap.  Knowing what I know now, my advice to anyone wanting to swap in a manual to one of these is to just plan on paying someone to reflash the ECU for you.  I wasted too much time trying to chase that mystery misfire that was solved with a tune removing the automatic trans parameters. 

So if you see this thing running around the WI, northern IL area, give the new owner a wave and snap a photo for me.

Onto the next adventure…

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