My first jeep...56 CJ5

I bought my 56 CJ5 off ebay about 3 years ago and have been learning from this site since then. I have been into cars since high school and have done quite a bit of work on them, but I knew nothing about jeeps. I have been pretty much just searching and reading, but I thought it might fun to post some of the things I have done to my jeep and what I am currently doing. So here it goes...

I got the jeep for use up at our cabin in Big Bear Lake in Southern California. As I'm sure many of you know there are a lot of trails up there and you need a street legal vehicle to go on many of them. An old jeep seemed like to me to be the perfect way for my family to enjoy the area in the summer.

I attached some photos... First is from the ebay ad I bought it from in the spring of 06.

Over the first year or so, I cleaned it up, painted it, made a roll bar, rebuilt the brakes and did a tune up and carb rebuild. The next picture is the first outing, in the desert near the salton sea in the summer of 07. I think it was about 150 degrees out, but the jeep did fine.

I used the jeep in Big Bear in the summer of 07 and even went through the Holcomb creek trail with some experienced help and the jeep did pretty well. I brought the jeep home after that summer and did some more tinkering and then used it again during this last summer up there. The jeep seemed under powered from the start to me, but not having anything to compare to I just figured that was what 74 horsepower felt like. I pretty much had to drive with the xfer case in low on anything but flat land and this along with the engine data I found online convinced me that something wasn't right, even though it seemed to run pretty well. I finally decided that since the whole family loves the jeep it would be worth going through the motor even though I was having a hard time diagnosing a problem. I attached an excel spreadsheet with some compression test data, etc. From this you can see cylinder 1 wasn't perfect. Anyway, I pulled the motor a couple of weeks ago and tore it down. Turns out the top compression ring in every cylinder was broken or missing and the piston from cylinder 2 (see photo) was in real bad shape. After seeing the condition of the motor, I am in awe over all the things I did with this jeep in the last two years. These motors truly are bulletproof

I dropped the motor off at the machinist and I am waiting on the inital work so I know what size pistons and bearings to buy. Turns out the motor was standard bore, and best I can tell (from serial numbers on the cj-3b site) it is the original motor. I am also planning on going through the trans and xfer case even though they both seemed to work fine, except they both leak a lot. Right now I am just trying to clean 50 years worth of grease/gunk off of everything.

I know you guys like pictures and I have more, but I could not figure out how to post more that 5 files.

 

"I know you guys like pictures and I have more, but I could not figure out how to post more that 5 files."

Use photobucket or a similar service and link to the pics instead of uploading them here. You'll quickly run out of space if you try to upload very many.

Nice Jeep by the way!

 

Will do...Thanks!

 

here are some more photos of the bad piston from cylinder 2.





After painting with rustoleum and a paint brush. My friends gave me a hard time about this since I know how to paint cars the right way.




Another pic of the other side of the motor fresh out of the car

 

Looks great. Painting Question - Did you use the method detailed in Hot Rod last year (among other places) and thin the Rustoleum with Mineral Spirits?

 

Nice looking JEEP. I'd say you improved it tenfold over the ebay pics.

 

I basically just used the rustoleum straight out of the can (it took about 3/4 of a gallon). I bought a pack of cheap wooded handled 2" paint brushes (like 10 for $10) from home depot and would just toss them after one use. Be sure to pull on the brush brissles before starting to get the loose ones out and keep an eye out for brissles while painting so you can pull them out of the paint before it is dry. It took two coats on everything to get good coverage and I thought it was very important to get all the brush strokes going the same way. It took me a couple of weeks of spare time to paint and I did thin the paint a little towards the end with acetone as specified in the paint directions. You can see some brush marks on the hood and dash if you are up close, but in general most people are very surprised that I painted it with a brush. The tub would have needed extensive preping to paint it correctly, this is why I decided to do it this way. Plus I didn't want to have to worry about a nice paint job since I use the jeep almost entirely off-road. For prep work I basically did a good cleaning and chipped off any loose paint. I then painted over everything else (having the paint on the thicker side helps with this). Having a light color also helps. I use to paint cars in college with a buddy for extra money. He now lives out of town, but when he was around he came by and checked out the jeep and gave me a hard time about being lazy and painting with a brush. He then looked at the wheels and said "well at least you sprayed the wheels"....turns out that I brushed rustoleum on them too.... you can't really see any brush strokes in the white. Not having a large flat area helps too.

I have never seen anything about painting a car with a brush. What sort of things are they saying to do?

 

The paint looks great, I will most likely paint mine in the same manner as like you when I go out I end up intimate with allot of brush, cactus tree limbs etc.

You will be amazed at how well a fresh F-Head pulls, The bores in mine were wore bad and already .050 over spec, Rather than sleeve the engine I opted for custom pistons .080 over........$$$$ ouch........but I am glad I did it.

 

Well, the motor rebuild hit it's first snag today, magnafluxing found some cracks in the block. The two bad ones are in the exhaust valve seats of cylinder 2 and 3 (others are in a water jacket? that can be sleeved). I think this may be a common area for cracking?? I was planning on having hardened seats put in and according to the machinist this and a couple of pins might do it. He is going to try and put the pins in this week and we'll see how it goes. Anyone else ever tried this repair?

 

See here

They use a roller, whenever I can get back out to the garage I plan on doing it this way.

 

Ohhh, I know all about snaggs when it comes to Jeep projects. Your machinist sounds like one of the good ones, and he should be able to repair the head sucessfully, with unleaded gas you are going to need the hardened steel seats anyhow. After that you'll ahve a pretty solid and strong motor in your '5. Keep up the good work.

 

I had those cracks in my L head. The machine shop has a subcontractor that uses LockNstitch to repair cracks. Basically thats a pinning process. Then the seats were installed etc etc. The repair was done about 10 years ago.

 

I've been a little overdue for an update. Things have progressed well and I haven't really hit any snags since the cracked block except for finding time to get the work done. I did have a near miss since I almost didn't pull the cover off of the oil pump pick up. I have attached a picture of what I found in there....I'm sure glad I pulled it apart. I have also enclosed pics of the block crack repair and some other pictures I have taken along the way. I hope to put it all back in the car Saturday, so hopfully in the next couple of weeks I'll fire it up. I'll keep you all posted....

 

nice!

 

Heres a link a guy did a charger. Has some links about 9 down from the top.rustoleum_paint_job

I hope to try this someday.:toetap:

 

Dang, nice Jeep!!! You're doing a great job! I also have a '56 CJ5, that's, uh, waiting for me to get my lazy self back in gear.

 

Got almost everything is this weekend. Hopefully it will run next Saturday.



IMG]http://i409.photobucket.com/albums/pp172/9942ateam/Jeep%20overview/IMG_1699.jpg[/IMG]

 

Wow! You're sure an ambitious lil' feller, wanna come work on mine when you're done?

 

It's alive!!

Fired up the engine today after work. Pretty much everything worked great. I ran it for about a half an hour at about 2000 RPM. I then got the timing and idle mixture set so it would idle real nice at 600 RPM. That's when I took the attached video.

About the only problem I ran into was when I put the coolant in last night. Almost immediately it started leaking coolant from most of the exhaust manifold bolts. I didn't know these went into the cooling jackets so I had not put sealant on them. I drained the coolant level down, backed out the bolts one at a time and but some RTV on them. This was last night. Tonight when I got home from work I put the coolant back in and the back bolt started leaking. I decided to fire it up and and see if it might fix itself. Wishful thinking cause it of course still leaks. I figured I'd drain the coolant again tomorrow, pull the exhaust manifold off, dry everything real well and try again with RTV on the bolts.

Does this sound like a good plan? Has anyone had any problems with this before?

Overall I am just real fired up that it runs so well. I haven't driven it yet, but I can not wait to see how it drives with all four cylinders working.


http://s409.photobucket.com/albums/pp172/9942ateam/Jeep overview/?action=view&current=MVI_1716.flv

 

Congratulations!

I put something like this on my exhaust studs:



no leaks. Let me know if you want to borrow some.

Eric