The Green Burb: Why I Traded for a Pile of Crap (And I’d Do It Again)

I need to be honest with you right off the bat: I didn’t buy this Suburban because it made sense. I bought it because I was bored.

Let me back up. A while back I had a Kia Spectra — and looking back, that thing was the perfect commuter car. Thirty miles to the gallon, cheap tires, I only touched it when it started making noise. But I got restless and traded it for a 1993 Jeep Cherokee because I decided I “needed” something more interesting. That Cherokee blew a head gasket almost immediately. So I bought a 2008 Grand Cherokee with a diesel, which turned into a full-blown nightmare. And then I traded the ’93 Cherokee for this Suburban, telling myself it’d make a killer camping rig.

It’s a pile of crap. Dents on dents on dents, doors that don’t open, a bumper that was already trashed before we ever hooked a chain to it. Lesson learned: don’t let boredom make your car-buying decisions for you.

But here’s the thing that actually justified this whole detour — this Suburban has the same transmission as the White Suburban, the “good” Suburban we picked up in Flagstaff. If this trans is solid, it solves a real problem for that build. So the day had a plan, and I wrote it on the whiteboard before we even opened the hood: get it running, test the trans up to highway speed, send it off a jump for some air if it’s up to it, then pull the drivetrain for parts.

Getting it running turned into the whole story. A cheap Amazon distributor rotor snapped almost immediately — glad I caught that before it caused a real headache. Then the engine straight up locked up on me. I ended up doing the thing you’re not supposed to do: hooking a battery straight to it and bumping it to try to break it free. When that didn’t work, I was underneath with a pry bar on the flex plate, feeding it extra juice, trying to convince a motor that hadn’t turned over in who-knows-how-long that it wanted to live again.

It finally broke loose. Pulled the plugs and found rust across the entire driver’s side bank — which had me wondering about a blown head gasket somewhere in this thing’s past. Cleaned up some take-off plugs from the Impala, reset the timing off the harmonic balancer, and got hopeful again.

Then the battery issue. Then a starter that might be bad. Then an engine that might just be tired. At some point you have to do the math: was it worth another hundred bucks and another day chasing a start, or did it make more sense to just pull the drivetrain and test the transmission where it actually mattered — in the White Suburban? A new starter would’ve cost about what a service on the transmission costs anyway. So I called it. No jump, no five feet of air — partly because the engine wasn’t cooperating, and partly because everything out here was tinder-dry and the last thing I needed was to be that neighbor who starts a grass fire for content.

So we pulled the drivetrain instead. Good news: the transmission pan came off clean — old and dirty, but no burnt smell, no chunks of clutch material. That’s a good sign for the White Burb. Grabbed the transfer case too, an NP208, and this one actually had fluid in it — unlike the one in the White Burb, which we found bone dry halfway through a snowstorm on the drive home from Flagstaff. Robbed a few more parts while I had the engine hanging — power steering pump, a fuel pressure regulator, the starter for a Jeep that’s got a trip coming up — and rolled what was left of the drivetrain out on a couple of furniture dollies rated for way less weight than they were carrying.

Then the backhoe came out. When you don’t care about the paint or the structural integrity of a vehicle anymore, a backhoe is a genuinely great way to finish the job.

It wasn’t the video I set out to make. But it did what it needed to do — gave us a transmission and a transfer case that are actually usable, a 307 that’s now surplus for some future small-car project (seriously, if you know of an engineless Nova or a six-cylinder Camaro sitting around, I want to hear about it), and it got us back into the new shop doing what this channel is actually about.

It’s been a long year. Building the shop ate up most of it, and the channel’s views showed it. But the shop’s done now, and we’ve got a stack of projects lined up and waiting. This was the first one back. More to come.

Wheel it, Wreck it, Wrench it, Repeat!