JB's 1970 CJ5 Intro and Hopefully Future Build thread

No fortunately I haven't spent much on it. I picked it up cheap from some people my wife knew. And most importantly, I'm not building it to sell, but plan on keeping for a long long time.
I am surprised by that low price though. I see similar condition CJ7's to that ad in my area listed between 5 to 8k+. I don't know if they sell for that or not, but they are out there. The only stuff I see in the 2 - 3500 range in my area are either projects that are disassembled or pretty rusted out.

Anyway, if I was worried about my resell value I would never have got into building this thing. It is solely for me to play with so no worries.

 

Shoot, down here in the valley a bone stock, beat up cj7 is averaging 3500 to 6000. Just say my buddies old '85 cj7 on craigslist yesterday. They had pulled the motor out and was reselling it for 3000 which im sure they will get for it too.

 

now that I look at the ad close, I think its a scam. To perfect and it doesn't look like tulsa. Too good to be true. not an unusual price, but not with that much going for it.

 

Yeah, I'm not planning on selling either Jeep anytime soon, but I know if I had to sell the 7 today (in the current state it is in)I would be taking a loss on her for sure. Once she has her new shoes, paint, custom cage, bumpers, tire carrier, etc etc etc I think I will be coming close to even what I could sell her for, but I'm sure I will likely have more in them then what I could sell them for. The nice thing is I'm not worried about selling either one. So if the time ever comes to sell either years down the road it really won't matter how much I spent and how much I sell it for. All that matters to me is the smile it puts on my face driving them.jeep toss


Ok, enough talking about the 7 for now. I am gonna try working on cleaning up the carb and rebuilding it the first of next week. I've been busy at work and it's been miserably hot and humid here the past few days so I haven't had any time to work on it yet. Juggling 2 projects at once is a challenge to say the least! I'm hoping my order from quadratec gets here soon!

 

Well good luck on the carb. I can build the 2g blindfolded i've done so many times, but I can't transfer my experience thru the web! post some pics if you have any problems.

 

Thanks Grant! Will do

 

by the way, it was a scam. I emailed the guy and he gave me the old "I am shipping out, you send me the money, i'll send you the car and title" bit. I flagged it.

 

Man I hate all those scams! I wish I could reach through the computer screen and punch those losers that prey on the elderly and/or naive.

 

x2

It is also disturbing to me that they would impersonate men and women in our military, people who risk everything to protect the rest of us, in order to scam people. They are the lowest form of life.

 

Yeah, it makes me mad how sick and LOW these people really are. Most of the ones I've been getting lately have their fictitious name plus "God Bless" at the end of their BS scam. Next thing you know these losers will have a scripture at the bottom of the email and impersonate military folks at the same time. Talk about using anything to scam people. My blood pressure goes up just thinking about it. Time to get me a nice 1/2 price Chocolate Milk Shake from Sonic. Yummy... that should cool me off!

 

Go work on your jeep and post lots of pictures. that cools me down......

 

I finally had some time yesterday to work on the carb. I let it soak in the lacquer thinner for a couple days and started cleaning it up. Once I got it all cleaned up - NOT Spotless - but clean, I started rebuilding it. It was much easier than I expected. Swapped out the old float for the new metal-copper float and got it all bolted back together with the new gaskets and supplied parts in the kit. I was kind of nervous at first when I was reading about getting the float level and the right measurements, but that was actually really simple.

Now that I have that carb project done I can attack the manifold and valve covers. I'm really nervous that I'm gonna uncover more problems and have to dig in deeper to the engine then what I hoped. BUT, in a weird way, I have always wanted to rebuild an engine. I don't know anything about this engine as far as condition. I guess tearing into it really won't hurt anything, but worst case scenario I just waste time on a worthless engine.

So I was just looking at the manifold and what all it would take to remove it and then I took a close look at the distributor. One of the clips that holds the distributor in place is broken and the previous owner used a black zip tie to hold it in place. When I grabbed the distributor it was pretty tight, but was loose and not secured well enough IMO. Am I completely screwed or is there any easy fix for this problem?? Or maybe I shouldn't say easy, just a fix for this problem? Here are a couple pics of it.




Another day and another problem on the Jeep!

 

Looks like the clip just screws to the side of the distributor. Screw another one in place? All those do is hold the cap down to the distributor and the only issue i see with how it is now (besides being a rigged fix) is water getting in there.

 

its a prestolite distributor. Just the cap is loose, not the distributor. A lot of the members here have switched to HEI so maybe they have the pieces you need to replace the missing clip or just a whole new distributor. They were made with Prestolites and delco-remy's. You can swap one distributor for another. The caps are not interchangeable, but the whole distributors are. Or you can just rig it up with new zip ties. Like 72cj5 says, if it is on tight it will work.

 

Thanks guys for the help. I appreciate it. If I have time I am hopefully gonna remove manifold and valve covers tomorrow. Will post some pics of what I find. Hopefully nothing scary under there..... but the way this thing has gone so far, there is no telling what's in there

I may replace the distributor once I get to that point.... I guess I will have to get some opinions on the best set up to go with if I do. Maybe go HEI??? First thing is first though. Gotta make sure this baby will fire up first. Here I go getting ahead of myself again

 

Well I got the manifold removed and one of the valve covers off today.... Now I am a newbie when it comes to digging into an engine so please point out anything that may look bad in the pics. I went a little picture happy and tried to get pics of every angle. I was happily surprised by what I saw or at least I hope. It looks very clean and from what I can tell, which is not much from a technical mechanical side, it looks to be in pretty good shape. No debris, etc and is clean. What would you guys do next? See anything alarming? I was thinking if it looks good and clean I would just order some new gaskets and bolt it back up. What do you guys think? Here are some of the pics I took

 

I am no engine expert either joel, but I think with all the anti freeze in there your going to need to pull the oil pan to make sure you get all the antifreeze removed.

Engine looks okay as far as I know but what do i know?

 

Thanks Grant. Yeah, I figured I would probably need to drop the oil pan after all that stinking antifreeze spewed in it. I guess there is probably a better way to prevent the antifreeze from getting in there when pulling the manifold..... too bad I didn't know that better way. I guess you just live and learn. Probably be good to drop the oil pan anyway to get it cleaned out good. I'm just happy it wasn't full of junk like I was expecting.

 

by the way, I think the whole reason you did this manifold pull if was because there might be corn or other objects in the intake. What did you find?

 

Yeah Grant, that was the biggest surprise of all this. All the corn was gone. I didn't find anything when I pulled the manifold. Nothing in the intake or anywhere for that matter. It was all clean. Very strange it just all disappeared. Here is the picture showing the corn right after I removed the carb and the whole reason I removed the manifold because I was worried other stuff was down there.



Here is the picture less than 24 hours after the above picture and before I got my shop vac out. It was all gone????????



So the good and bad. I guess I didn't need to remove the manifold after all, but I am glad I did it anyway so I know for sure there isn't any corn etc in there. Just very strange how quickly that corn vanished on it's own......