I’m going to make this short and sweet as with the whole world coming to an end and what not, you and I do not have a lot of time for flowering introductory paragraphs filled with useless adjectives that are obviously pulled from some sort of online thesaurus and inserted into said paragraph in a desperate and moronic attempt to impress the many members of the female race that are not reading this because it contains the words “Hot Rod” in the title and that’s just boring.

Reader, meet Ruby. Ruby, meet reader.

Ruby comes from a long line of exclusive American icons. While a majority of her siblings that came before her are rusting in pieces, Ruby was initially purchased in a place where there is no snow or salt and thus, no resulting rust – South Florida.  As her VIN plate says, she first opened her eyes as a 1999 Jeep Cherokee Sport. Being used and 14-years-old, this XJ is a bit special in that it has zero rust, under 1,000,0000 miles, no more than 200k miles and even less than 150k miles. Plus, it has a manual transmission or in nerdy, never get any girl with that kind of talk gearhead lingo, an AX15. While the gear box is a bit rare, the rest of the running gear is typical tried and true 20-year-old Jeep stuff. Connecting the two front wheels together is a Dana 30 solid axle, a Chrysler 8.25 works the back all while a NP231 transfer case puts everything together. The task of creating power and torque properly is dealt with by way of the absolutely legendary 4.0 liter PowerTech straight six.

Now, any rational person would say, “hey, I found a rare, well together and reliable Jeep – I’ll just leave well enough alone,” but as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not rational – I’m a car guy. This tale will thus chronicle the misadventures of ruining a perfectly functional automobile for the sake of daydreams and fantasies. Plans are to make her more deadly, more capable and more kickbutt awesome. Some day soon, the world will end and this little red box will be a vital weapon in the Hot Rod Apocalypse.