Potential Explorer owner and Jurassic Park conversion

[festiboi]

Hey Explorers,
Awesome site everyone!

Ever since I was a child, I've loved Jurassic Park and as a car fanatic, loved the first generation Explorer. I always wanted my parents to buy one after the movie, but no dice. The styling and ruggedness of the original Explorer was always appealing.

The itch has followed me all these years and I've been wanting to do a full-fledged Jurassic Park conversion. Its just awesome

I found a clean 1993 Explorer XLT 4X4 with 90k miles from the original owner for sale. Its very clean, in almost showroom condition, and has all service records. They want $3K for it. This will be a secondary car just for fun, but I'm a little hesitant given Ford's shaky history of reliability, especially with automatics. I'd be getting rid of my other toy, a reliable 1988 Daihatsu Charade for the Ford. I guess I'm on here to see what your experiences are with this era Explorer and would you feel confident in buying it. I hear both horror stories of transmission failures at 60k miles and others of Explorers going 200k+ miles without a major issue. Its hard to make sense of it

I have found a local company that will wrap the car in the Jurassic Park design. I'm excited about it, but am just wondering if this is a bad idea or crazy investment

Are there any other common issues with this Explorer I should look for?

Thanks!

Ryan

 

[festiboi]

As a follow-up, here are the pictures of the actual Explorer I'm considering:

 

[Camacorn]

Any vehicle can make it to 200,000 easily if well maintained. And you said they include all service records, so they obviously maintained it well. It looks very clean outside and in, but crawl up underneath of it and look for leaks, most people forget to check there when buying a vehicle.

However, even being as clean as it is, $3,000 seems a little bit steep to me.

As for the Jurassic Park conversion, my answer is DO IT ( but post pics. )

 

[festiboi]

Any vehicle can make it to 200,000 easily if well maintained. And you said they include all service records, so they obviously maintained it well. It looks very clean outside and in, but crawl up underneath of it and look for leaks, most people forget to check there when buying a vehicle.

However, even being as clean as it is, $3,000 seems a little bit steep to me.

As for the Jurassic Park conversion, my answer is DO IT ( but post pics. )

Thanks Camacorn. All good advice (especially doing the JP conversion)!

I did crawl under the car and there were no leaks of any sort. I did forget to check the rear differential, just in case.

The $3000 seems a bit steep to me as well. It was originally $4000, but I got them down to that by offering $2500, which seemed more fair. They said that they haven't had anyone else look at it after being for sale several weeks, so I'm willing to risk it by getting back to them in week and see if they would be willing to drop it to $2500 and just get it out of there.

 

[Camacorn]

Thanks Camacorn. All good advice (especially doing the JP conversion)!

I did crawl under the car and there were no leaks of any sort. I did forget to check the rear differential, just in case.

The $3000 seems a bit steep to me as well. It was originally $4000, but I got them down to that by offering $2500, which seemed more fair. They said that they haven't had anyone else look at it after being for sale several weeks, so I'm willing to risk it by getting back to them in week and see if they would be willing to drop it to $2500 and just get it out of there.

That's what I would do as well, keep me posted.