What Did You Do To Your Jeep Today?

And yes it's amazing what you can haul in/on a JEEP.

 

I know right where that is! WPHS Class of 84....go Panthers!

 

It could be debated if the $100 savings was worth it. It was a good experience though and kept me inside doing Jeep work on a chilly weekend. The 500w halogen lamp cured the Detroit diesel green nicely out in the garage. The wife has been suprisingly tolerant of the kitchen takeover. I did feed her Chipotle lime marinated London broil and seasoned roast potatoes last night.

 

Found a local guy who had a gasket in stock, and would install my old windshield all for $140.00. Couldn't pass that up. Now I have glass!, one step closer

 

Probably liked that better than the Rochester 2 you cooked up yesterday

 

I went to start the Jeep today, the battery voltage was down to 10.6 and it would not spin the starter.

I made the mistake of lending a battery charger to a neighbor that move away the next day. That charger was my Dad’s it was a 2/6 amp charger that didn’t have all that voltage sense crap. I also have a Harbor Freight and a 24V charger for the generator batteries. Both of these chargers are now dead. The HF unit got left out overnight and it rained. I don’t remember what killed the 24V unit.

So I took the HF apart, stripped out everything found the wires from the xformer for the 2amp and 10 amp windings, installed a bridge rectifier and voila’ you've got a charger………. Without current limiting. And of course you know what happens next…… I had a lawn mower battery that was almost dead. Put the charger on it and walked away. I came back later, the smell of blue smoke having escaped it bonds, the bridge was completely disintegrated. And this time the transformer went with it.

So, I’ve ordered a bunch of components, and going to build a new charger from scratch. I have a current limiting circuit all sketched out and ready to go and I have a 12V 20 amp transformer, and I have a half dozen more 20 amp bridge rectifiers. Ordered the rest of the stuff on ebay, $12.50 for resistor kit, transistor kit, diodes, assorted 25 turn pots. I used to have this stuff all over the place. But we cleaned house about 5yrs back and none of the electronics stuff survived. It’s the old adage keep and collect stuff for 40 years and never use it, throw it out and next week you need it.

While I’m waiting I used the Suburban to jump the Jeep and ran it awhile to bring the battery back up.

I have a system to parallel a second battery, but this is the second time it has not worked. I guess I shouldn’t have put the Olds in the garage. Gotta love winter

 

Hate it when the magic smoke leaves it's confines!

 

Took it out for a drive. Trying to get miles on it on my days off so I can confirm reliability before taking it out further like to work and whatnot.

 

I'm prepping to swap out the heater core can hook the heater back up in the 71. The breather cap on the Buick 350 doesn't leave much room for the hoses so I swapped the valve covers side-to-side. Spent a good 15 minutes pounding the flanges flat and used fresh gaskets. Maybe that will slow down one of the leaks. I've also been unhappy with the spark plug wire routing, so I got some valve cover bolt wire looms and installed them too. It's looking cleaner. Will look even better with the heater hoses hooke up properly.

Before:


After:

 

Yes black heater hose for sure! I hate that red stuff.

 

I pulled the Olds out of the garage, and put the Jeep in, to work on the dual battery setup. Gotta find out why it's not working.

 

Did You do the 350 Buick Conversion and How do You like it ?

If You did it were there problems making it fit ?

 

It was already in there when I got the Jeep, but I can still provide some insight.

It uses the same motor mounts/bellhousing as the V6 so it's basically a bolt-in. The extra length however is a challenge in a short-hood CJ. The folks that did this one cut the cowl portion of the grill and slid the back face forward so the radiator mounting flange is against the back of the headlight buckets:


Now the radiator sits on top of the front cross frame and they had to shorten it's height to clear the hood. You can see where they cut and shortened the mounting bracket:


Even with all that, clearance is super tight. It has a low profile fan with no spacer that clears the crank pulley by 1/4" and the radiator by 1". Looking up from the bottom, you can see how close front crossframe and fan are to the crank pulley:


Even though the radiator is cut down, it's a 3-row so it should have decent capacity.

It was having cooling issues at low speeds when I bought it and I was planning to swap a V6 back into it. However, the issues seemed to mostly stem from the timing being extremely retarded (like 15 degrees). Now that I've given it a good tune up, it's running great with no heat issues (at least in non-summer months) . I like the motor. It's nice and torquey and the compression is good so I think I'm going to run it for a while. For cooling insurance in hot weather, I'm going to put a bigger pusher ran in front of the radiator and make a better shroud.

If I was doing this conversion from scratch, I would cut out the factory cross frame and built a new one further forward so a full sized radiator can fit. If you went with a narrower radiator, you could fit it between the headlight buckets and move it further forward for better fan clearance. Other than that, It's a decent conversion. The Buick 350 is the longest stroke/smallest bore of all the 350/351s, so it's a nice match for a Jeep. The front distributor is nice too.

 

I rode shotgun on Pritchett Canyon trail in Moab in a heavily modded CJ5 with a Buick 350, and that thing was impressive. Perfect power curve for wheeling.

 

I can't believe she found that.

 

I found out why my dual battery setup doesn't work. When I first put this in I used HF jumper cables. About 6 mo later the setup quit working, the cables had rotted inside. I sliced them open length wise and there was nothing but corrosion and crumbling wire. So I replaced the cables with new ones, problem solved, right? Well it turns out I missed one short wire, about 12" under the battery. So I'll replace it tomorrow.

 

Thanks Fireball

Did they use the stock exhaust manifolds ?

Does the manifold clear the steering ? how about the spark plugs ?

Mel.

 

Yes, stock Buick manifolds with rear dumps on both sides. No steering clearance issues at all with the Saginaw conversion. The left side also clears the stock floor pivot pedals. The exhaust passes under the frame rails in front of the skid plate and routes outboard all the way to the back bumper:


All spark plugs are easy to access. Best access to the rear driver's side ones is reaching under the heater box, but still easy. You can see them all in these photos: