NDNplanner
Active Member
Greetings EXPY community! I'm a college lecturer from Albuquerque, New Mexico and have been looking forward to joining the community! This past winter I picked up a 1st Gen '97 Expedition Eddie Bauer 4x4 as my winter break project, which of course ran all the way into the summer with projects to spare. The back story on my Expy is short. The original owner was a drug dealer who purchased this Expy as his 'ride' and loaded it with speakers and misc electronics. After some time he went straight and gave the car to his mom because it drank too much gas. She in turn only drove it to church on Sunday's. After she stopped driving it, it spent about 5 years parked in the garage where it was then sold to my younger brother who then proceeded to drive it into the ground (my little bro is notorious for doing ZERO maintenance on his vehicles).
I've always had a man-crush on the first gen EXPY's! After all the '97 models were THE SUV's that kick-started the whole SUV craze here in 'Merica. During a random conversation with my mom, I found out that my younger brother was planning on selling it and that's when I jumped in with both feet and bought it off him. When I first started wrenching on it, it had yards of random wires running all over the body. Apparently, the drug dealer who added all the extra subwoofers and such did his own install and did some really questionable wiring jobs (I found speaker wire which had been used to connect the 12v load for electronics and had been used as video cables). Anyway, after a few solid weekends just to get the electrical under control I then started on the rest. Passenger fender was dented as well as the front bumper but it was nothing a few trips to the local U-pull-your-own-parts place couldn't fix. I also replaced the rear air shocks with coils, built my own custom roof rack, added a solar panel (good-bye alternator), added an inverter to the front, added a brush guard, blacked out all the lights and added some switches with a voltmeter to the middle console as well as other stuff. Future mods include rims, tires, another inverter in the rear of the vehicle as well as some other camping mods. I'll continue to participate in the community as I move forward. Nice to 'meet' you all. Thanks for having me aboard.
I've always had a man-crush on the first gen EXPY's! After all the '97 models were THE SUV's that kick-started the whole SUV craze here in 'Merica. During a random conversation with my mom, I found out that my younger brother was planning on selling it and that's when I jumped in with both feet and bought it off him. When I first started wrenching on it, it had yards of random wires running all over the body. Apparently, the drug dealer who added all the extra subwoofers and such did his own install and did some really questionable wiring jobs (I found speaker wire which had been used to connect the 12v load for electronics and had been used as video cables). Anyway, after a few solid weekends just to get the electrical under control I then started on the rest. Passenger fender was dented as well as the front bumper but it was nothing a few trips to the local U-pull-your-own-parts place couldn't fix. I also replaced the rear air shocks with coils, built my own custom roof rack, added a solar panel (good-bye alternator), added an inverter to the front, added a brush guard, blacked out all the lights and added some switches with a voltmeter to the middle console as well as other stuff. Future mods include rims, tires, another inverter in the rear of the vehicle as well as some other camping mods. I'll continue to participate in the community as I move forward. Nice to 'meet' you all. Thanks for having me aboard.
