Willys Jeep Project

[liflod]

Looking good Nick!

[Nubs]

Glad to see Your sticking with it, Crazy amount of work yes!

Keep up the good work

[Nubs]

[Nick O.]

I've done a ton of work over the past month. Since the Jeep was already torn apart, I can't drive it for a while, and the engine smoked like an Attex, it was time for a rebuild. So I pulled it out and gave the honor to Keith to rebuild. With that out of the way I spent some time cleaning up the engine bay and brought it to the level of the rest of the Jeep.


Then I bought some gems to flip for parts money


I'm frustrated just typing this. The first time I painted the body, the paint gun got clogged up and spit/sputtered. The next time, I wasn't putting on enough paint or fast enough. The third time, I mastered it.


The goal this week is to make her a roller again. Install the front disk brakes, clean the rear drums, then replace the bearings in the tcase intermediate shaft & replace the rear pinion seal. I should have the majority of the rest of my parts in primer. It's the beginning of the end!

[tbone9]

Looks like it's coming along nice. Good thing you had fun with it at haspin, bet you won't wanna pound it through the mud after all this work? Been frustrated a time or two with painting myself. Unless you do it a lot it's kinda tricky. When the kid first got her drivers license I got a lot more practice though. Lol

[Nubs]

Nice, All good free lesson's to use over a lifetime. if paint N body were easy guys could'nt charge 3K and up to do it.

I like savin' the money

[Nubs]

[Nick O.]

Whoops I haven't updated this in a long time. After I took the engine out, I thought while I'm at it we should remove the tranny to fix the grinding noise. Then we walked around it and thought, "It would be easier to remove the tub than crawl under and unbolt the crossmember."

And you can't just leave half the frame rusty...


Thankfully olive drab is a forgiving color; if there's a scratch I can spray bomb over it and it blends in perfectly. Re-priming and painting had no effect on the end results. I wish I just went all out in the beginning and had it sandblasted. I think I could have saved 3 months by completely going through this intially, but I didn't mean to go this far.


By the time I was finished re-doing everything, the engine was ready to paint. My goal was to have everything else ready to install the engine and roll. Almost...


Now that I was this far, I should probably fix the oil leak on the rear axle. So I bought a new yoke and it should have been a 10 minute installation. It took a blowtorch, puller, 2 hammers, and about half an hour to remove that rusted junk yoke. After the yoke was off, I noticed movement in the shaft (probably because the oil drained out so quick and ran dry). It could cost $200 in bearings and races to fix it. So I thought swapping axles would be quick and easy...

While I waited for a new yoke I decided to pull of the drums and install a keyway I stole out of it months ago. Little did I know I was dealing with the devil himself. The drums wouldn't come off if my life depended on it. I probably held up Max production getting everyone to help remove these monsters. We spent a week off and on working at them. Fire, hub puller, pb blaster, fire, more fire. Eventually we burnt out the oil seals and I had a huge mess. It was so bad I hammered the drums and axle shafts out as a whole and replaced them with my old ones. Then I spent another week installing oil seals. And another week pressing together drums, breaking hubs, ordering hubs, and finally got them right.


Then I rebuild the rear drum (shoes on correct direction now), and installed the front disk brake conversion. Everything had to be a pain and not go smoothly of course.


Finally she was ready to sit on the ground once again. My dad and I dropped down the engine/tranny. Then we pushed it into daylight!


The latest update as today: After we couldn't flare the brake lines, I took it to a local car place to do it right. They only did half the job and shoved it outside and told me to get it out. So I'm dragging it to another place to finish the last line they refused to make (and instead put back on the line that was cut in half). After all this, I can drop the tub back on and make the radiator mounts. Then paint the misc engine parts and dress the engine. *fingers crossed* I test drive it next weekend. It's a stretch but I'm a dreamer.

[Mike]

That is looking so good. You're not going to want to get it dirty again after all of that work.

[wfo]

looks good, when i did my 50 i converted the front to disc and the rear. the rear axle was out of a 72 1/2 CJ5 so converting it was easy, still has offset unit. have fun building.

[Nubs]

Nice Work right there...

[Andyman]

Coming along so nice