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Originally Published: August 2013 Words: Robbie Ronson Pictures: Vic Peel

Rough Country’s +4” long-arm kit frees up plenty of travel at the front. At the top of the picture here you can just see where the anti-roll bar has been disconnected, using JKS units, to let the axle articulate still further

At the heart of the long-arm suspension lift are these, er, long arms. Rough Country says these feature up to 20 and 35 degrees of pivot in their upper and lower joints respectively, which combined with their increased arc of travel allows vastly improved articulation over the standard set-up

The long control arms for the front axle are mounted on a heavy-duty add-on crossmember that comes as part of the Rough Country kit

The arms’ geometry and mounting positions on the chassis and axle can be seen here. Rough Country’s X-Flex joints boast a 2.5” body size and 1.25” threads, and they’re fitted using top-quality OEM-style rubber bushes

The anti-roll bar is still attached at the back, which doesn’t sound like any fun. Standard brakes can sound like a little too much fun on many’s a modded 4x4, but Jeep’s big anchors are more than up to the task of clamping those outsize BFGs

A 4” lift is enough to let you put 33” tyres on a Grand… but even then you’ll still need to trim the front bumper

As well as the taller suspension, Nick fitted Rough Country’s 2.2” steering dampers and an adjustable panhard rod

Rough Country warns customers that with this much lift, vehicles with a CV-style front prop are likely to suffer vibration. ‘The CV prop limits droop and flex,’ adds Nick, ‘so I sorted out a UJ one’

Most of the WJs sold in the UK came with first a 3.1 and then a 2.7 turbo-diesel engine. The 4.7 V8 was very much a luxury option – all kinds of gorgeous, but definitely not frugal. Even with the LPG system seen here, Nick reckons he only gets the equivalent of about 24mpg

Nick hasn’t bothered with a heavy-duty bumper for the front, preferring to keep the Jeep looking the way he thinks it ought to be. That’s a route you’d follow at your own peril in some vehicles, but the WJ’s tougher than most SUVs of its era – this bash guard might not be made of 6mm steel, but it’ll shrug off most impacts short of the kind that come from out and out abuse

The crossmember that comes as part of the Rough Country package is there primarily to mount the front control arms. But as you can see here, it certainly doesn’t take the job of protecting the transmission lightly either

If you know your Grands, you’ll recognise this as a rock slider from the Overland model. The Jeep itself is a Limited, which came with minging chrome things, but Nick resolved to do something about that after denting one of them. He found that the chassis fixings for the Overland units weren’t there – leading him to conclude that this model must have been engineered from scratch in the factory, not just accessorised afterwards

Nick doesn’t mind roughing it off-road, but he loves the fact that as well as being a great tool, the Jeep has heated leather seats, cruise control, air-con and so on. ‘It’s a bit of an armchair off-roader, really,’ is his verdict – but when you do 50,000 miles a year, a vehicle that’s home from home is just what you want

Nick bought a Safari Snorkel after a river crossing during a laning trip with Birty Dastards Jeep Club saw the water lapping his bonnet. Not good when your truck’s air intake has been moved to the bottom of its grille to make space for a valve lube system. He normally runs it with the scoop reversed so as not to trouble the LPG with too much ram air

Nick Albion describes his Jeep Grand Cherokee as an ‘armchair off-roader.’ With 50,000 road miles to do every year, on top of needing to be able to access some of the most remote working locations in the country, he’s entitled to a bit of comfort. Not least because having lifted it ever higher through a series of suspension kits and tyre combos, he’s finally got it finished. At least, he says he has…

A lot of people who want to buy a 4x4 convince themselves that they need one for work. Whether it’s because they tow a tiny little trailer every so often, or one of their clients has a gravel car park, or once in a while they carry loads of luggage you could fit perfectly well into a medium sized hatchback, they tell themselves that only a 4x4 will do.

As we all know, they’re right. Only a 4x4 will do. Not because they really do need one for work but because, well, if only a 4x4 will do, then only a 4x4 will do.

Nick Albion knows that very well. He’s a signalling and telecoms engineer on the railways, so he spends his time working at what are called ‘authorised access points’ on the line – most of which are reached via rough tracks.

In his line of work, it’s true that only a 4x4 will do. A few of his colleagues try to do it in everyday cars, and he spends a lot of time towing them out when they’ve got stuck. That’s when they’re not walking miles from one lineside box to the next because their crummy little Euroboxes can’t hack the drive.

Nick’s been there and done that. Three years ago, he had a Renault Laguna, and a point came during the winter whiteout when he couldn’t see the wheels for snow. ‘I was stuck,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t get to work for three days, and that’s not funny when you’re self-employed.’

Times have changed. ‘Now, you have a foot of snow or water outside and I’ll still be able to get to work. When it snows, I often go out and drive around seeing if anybody needs help!’

That’s because of the vehicle we’re looking at here, which he bought to ensure that once the snow had melted enough to let him flog the Laguna, he wouldn’t be getting into the same spot again. It’s a late Jeep Grand Cherokee WJ (or, to be precise, a WG, a code name given to round-foglight facelift models from 2004 until the end of production the following year), which he started modding about 18 months ago.

Despite the Laguna he had before it, which we’ll tactfully call a little lapse of judgement, the Grand is by no means the first 4x4 Nick’s owned. There was a Frontera, then a Grand Cherokee ZJ whose gearbox went bang, and he’s also the owner of a Pilgrim-bodied, Range Rover chassised off-road kit car that gets regular pastings at his local quarry (or Kirton Off Road Centre, as it’s known to most of us).

Now, this wouldn’t be much of a story if that was all there was to it, but Nick likes his cars. He’s got a show-stopping Cobra, too, he’s restoring a CJ6 and having marshalled at the recent King of the Valleys Qualifier, he’s now planning to build something he can compete in next year. ‘I think I might be a serial modifier,’ he confesses, and the Jeep proves his point. It’s a work truck, and it was never meant to become a modded off-roader. But just one look and you can see how well that plan worked out…

It all started when Nick joined the Birty Dastards Jeep Club. The Grand he’d bought was pretty much spot-on for him, with the big 4.7 V8 engine and LPG already installed, but a rear ball joint was knocking and he wanted some advice

on what to do about it, so he hit the club’s forum to ask his fellow owners.

He got plenty of advice, and he’s been an enthusiastic member ever since. But he also got a severe case of The Jeep Bug. ‘Initially I bought it just for work,’ he admits. ‘And I joined Birtys as an off-roading novice. But then I saw all the modified trucks, so like a sheep I followed…’

We’re always going on about how the best way to get what you want from a project is to plan it as thoroughly as you can before you start. Nick did pretty much exactly the opposite, but he’s living proof that even if it’s not the cheapest or quickest way to go about it, taking a suck-it-and-see approach to modding can still work.

‘The first mod was a 2” puck lift,’ he says, ‘and I hoiked on some 31” General Grabber ATs.’ You’ll more often hear people calling it a spacer lift, but a puck lift simply involves putting blocks in the spring mounts to add height and allow for bigger tyres. A little too big, in fact, at least for the bodywork on Nick’s WJ, which soon got a seeing to from the business end of a Stanley knife to stop all the rubbing.

Job done? Er, well… ‘After a couple of Lincolnshire laning trips, I realised that 2” just wasn’t enough. So with a contact in Birtys, I sorted an Iron Rock 3” lift.’

This came with an adjustable panhard rod, and Nick also added a UJ-style front prop to replace the standard unit, which was equipped with a CV joint and therefore wasn’t so good at staying with the amount of droop the suspension was now able to achieve. That improved matters a lot, and Nick was happy. His Jeep was finished.

Unfortunately, he made the mistake of saying this to everyone on Birtys. ‘Jeeps are never done!’ was their mob-handed response, and next thing you know there’s a 4” long-arm kit from Rough Country winging its way across the Atlantic. ‘This was the first one imported and fitted to a truck in the UK, they said. Proper trendsetter, me…’

Nick’s mate Richard Petyt joins the story here, as the two of them fitted the suspension as a team. ‘He’s a first-class mechanic. But two days on my back fitting it with the Jeep on axle stands was no fun. Americans don’t know whether to go metric or imperial, but can let you know both when talking about the same nut and bolt in the same sentence. I learnt some new words, though…’

The bigger lift allowed for bigger tyres, so the WJ now rides on 33” BFGoodrich Mud-Terrain KM2s. He’s a big fan, too, praising their road manners and longevity while emphasising that they’re a vast improvement off-road on the all-terrains he used to run.

And that’s how Nick rolls. He’ll buy something, try it, decide if he likes it and, if he doesn’t, sell it on and buy something else instead. He added a set of roof lights after the 3” lift, but after a while a fellow club member offered him a good price on a set of Lazers ‘which are so bright that at night, people are getting up for work as they think dawn has broken.’

Another classic case was the set of Bushwacker flares he bought, with the intention of running wheel spacers to give the truck a wider stance. ‘I’ll get in idea in my head, then I’ll go off and try it. I put the flares up against the Jeep, looked at it and it just didn’t look right. I always want to keep it looking like the Jeep it used to be.’

That’s a good example of the approach he has in general. ‘I never wanted to take it so far that it was uncomfortable and undriveable. I’ve taken it to the point where I can enjoy it, but I don’t want to go too far. You do get to the point where the truck’s fantastic and it’s done, and then you think “what’s next?” But this is the perfect work truck for me, and if there’s anything wrong with it I am the most depressed man in the world! I’ve done 100,000 miles in it in the last two years, so I’ve always got to put that side of it first.’

It’s a strange blend, then, this Grand. It’s a daily drive, a work truck, an off-road toy and a stickered-up street machine. And it ticks each of these boxes with aplomb.

With the combination of V8 power and LPG, it even manages to be a tarmac terror and, within reason, a sensibly economical and undeniably planet-friendly do-everything motor. It even doubles up as a zombie invasion response vehicle, if the sticker on the back is to be believed, and what this shows is that like any good modded car, it’s a pretty cool window on its owner’s personality, too (Nick’s sense of humour shows through in every sticker it wears).

It’s not every vehicle that can do so many different things so very well, but there’s a reason why Nick drives a Jeep. Actually, of course, there are several reasons, and towing his fellow lineside engineers out of ballast traps in their stay-on-the-road-mobiles is just one of them. And there’s just the one kind of vehicle that’s up to the job. We’ve been saying it all along: sometimes, only a 4x4 will do.

We photographed Nick’s Jeep at Kirton Off Road Centre, a vast quarry site near Scunthorpe. The terrain there is very varied and pretty legendary, as is how stuck you can get… To find out more, visit www.korc.co.uk.

BF GOODRICH MUD-TERRAINS, LPG CONVERSION, JKS DISCONNECTS, SAFARI SNORKEL, ROUGH COUNTRY SUSPENSION ARMS