It's Great Having Spare Parts

As I mentioned a few times before, I'm working on a zero budget drivetrain rebuild of my cj5. Today justified all the years of storing multiple transfer cases.

I originally was keeping multiple so I could swap the twin stick into the big hole case. Well today I was reassembling the combined case, and was looking at the needle bearings neatly greased inside the intermediate gear. I started thinking how lousy it would be if it was bearing grease rather than assembly grease in there, so I pulled them out to degrease everything.

When I pulled them out, I noticed that the chrome finish was all crumbling on the needle bearings! It felt like someone had scuffed them along the garage floor before installing them.

Luckily, I had a tin full of perfect needle bearings sitting on the workbench. 5 minutes later, it was repacked, and I feel much better about it. Thank goodness for spare parts!

 

You gotta love the Chinese crap bearings that are chrome plated to try to look like a real needle bearing.
I'm glad you found those junk parts before driving on them and destroying the gears.
-Donny

 

Good luck and patience...

 

Patience is what I need; it's slow going. I wish I could just pull out ten grand and throw a parts catalog at it like the jk guys do. Some of you may remember that I almost threw in the towel and parted this thing out, but cooler minds prevailed and the Jeep is now in the garage getting picked apart slowly.

The crazy thing is I have all of the big parts to completely overhaul the Jeep. Probably twice. But its the little things that really add up fast!

Also on the menu today was chipping away the 1/4" of bondo that my dad and I put over pretty much the entire tub. I had forgotten we had actually made a fiberglass rear corner, lol!

This was all before the age of the internet, and JC whitney was the only catalog that had parts. I remember getting in new floors that DID NOT fit... turns out they look a lot like the cj7 ones that are out there today.

 

What, you didn't have the Sears Jeep/Scout parts catalog decades ago?
-Donny

 

The best thing that happened to me when I started on my Jeep was one of my Ironworker friends son was a Tech at a dealership. One of the other Techs told him he had a Jeep and just wanted it gone, he was never going to finish it. We went over to his house to look at it, it had been stored outside somewhere, and water had gotten in and rotted the floors, but it was a 66 V 6 with 27k miles on it. I took my friends tow dolly and $200.00 with me, I got real lucky. Someone had already re-done the axels, all new brakes, wheel cylinders, seals, and pinion seals, 3:73 gears. The frame, unlike mine, was perfect. I gave the V 6 stuff to another guy, as I already had a NOS F 134 in the box for my build. The guy I gave the V 6 to found a cracked block, that explained why it only had 27k miles on it when it was parked. So anyway parts is the answer, I wound up with three f 134's, three transfer cases, three sets of axels and two T 90 transmissions, and two bodies, and a good frame to start with.
Parts is Parts.

 

Hahaha, what decade was that? I found my cj in the mid 90's.