'66 Trail Tux Build

X2.. did the same

 

That's what it had, but it would only work off and on. Maybe I'll rebuild that system short term.

Eventually I would like to get a nice temp gauge, and I'd prefer not to have the stock temp gauge idling there uselessly. That's why I've considered converting it to another tank gauge.

 

I would definitely consider putting some money into that 8274 vs putting a harbor freight winch in its place. Best winch there is IMO.

 

I'd like to, but right now the HF winch works and the 8274 doesn't. The steel cable on the 8274 was pretty cruddy (lots of flat spots, rust, some fraying) and I didn't want to spend the $$ on new line and possibly new solenoids just yet.

However, I'm not sure weather or not I'll actually shoot for tcase gears and a tcase/OD rebuild this summer, so that'll probably free up some funds that I can dump into the winch.

 

A T18/T98 SM420/465 swap isn't super easy, but I think it's worth doing over T-case gears. Especially with the transmission you have currently. That low first gear makes all the difference in the world trying to go slow, but doesn't change much else. You can still use a standard overdrive bowl gear if you decide to add an OD to the Dana 18 instead of having to source one to work with lower t-case gears. Final ratio in 4th is still 1:1.

 

A 4-speed is definitely a better choice than the 3.15s from a usability standpoint. However, a 4-speed is also $1k-$2k more than tcase gears and will likely take months, whereas 3.15s could probably be done in a couple of weeks bar major problems.

Right now I have a Warn OD on the back of the D18, so I'd be looking at $1100 plus ~$500 to rebuild the D18 and OD.

I don't have a ton of time between college semesters, and a 4-speed would probably take up most if not all of a summer break. The 3.15s wouldn't take as much time, but will still take a couple of weeks. I may not get to 3.15s this summer at all, as my Dakota is back east and it is sometimes difficult to drive my parents' vehicles when the Jeep is down.

 

Today when I was driving back from work (Yes, I haul a mower in a 58 year old Jeep [Shouldn't have left the daily at college]) my speedo cable decided to die on me. I had noticed a chirping/brushing sound off and on that started roughly 10 minutes before the cable broke. I was driving along just fine, when suddenly the Jeep made a horrible grinding noise quite similar to the sound of me jamming it in reverse instead of 2nd, as I did when I first drove it. It seemed to be coming directly from the trans tunnel cover, and I feared the worst. I pulled off of the 55mph 4-lane road and into a neighborhood as quickly as I could. I shut the Jeep off and gave it a once-over underneath, then a twice-over. Not finding anything wrong, I decided to shift in and out of gear, overdrive, 4x4, and low-range to see if that was the problem. (I have had the 4x4 selector start grinding before as it would not go all the way into 2wd without me stopping the Jeep.) I finally fired up the Jeep again, set off, and everything seemed fine. Until I got it into 2nd gear, which is when the sound came right back and was worse than before. Long story short-ish, I did that a few times before I finally noticed that the speedo needle had stopped moving and was canted downwards. I pulled the cable out of the speedo, and this greeted me:

It is hard to tell in this photo, but the threads(?) are stripped in multiple spots, squared off, and broken at the end. Once I discovered this, I zip-tied it out of the way and gave the Jeep one more test drive. The grinding was finally gone, and I was able to get the pile back home without getting pulled over. On the bright side, this may finally motivate me to pull the back half of the tcase apart so I can get the new speedometer gears in. May even be able to fix a few leaks while I'm at it.

In other news, I threw my hardtop on a couple of days ago for some mock-up. Here's some pics of that.

It was quite a pain to get the roof on by myself, even after I pulled the sides off.

I've figured out that I should mount the doors before I drill holes for the cab, so I can get the fitment right. One of the door's filler pieces is broken off and will need to be welded back on, and I've discovered some rust that was hiding behind the headliner. One small patch will need to be made on the right side, as a 3" section of flat metal is broken off where the roof bolts down to the sidepanel.

 

Well it's been a good while since I've updated this thread, as I was very busy working on the Jeep and getting things squared away before college life hit again. Now I've finally found some time and forced myself to go through the tedious process of uploading some 30 pics first from my phone to my computer, then from my computer to here. But, it's finally time to button down and update the thread, so here goes.

I started the process of a D18+OD rebuild longer ago than I care to admit, but much later in the summer than I originally intended to. I was first talked out of doing it, then later on I was (more or less) told "fix the leaks or else." Turns out, my parents aren't enjoying the free rust-proofing my Jeep is giving the driveway (as in the horrendous oil leaks). So armed with a time crunch, a lot of youtube videos watched, and the previous mechanical record of rebuilding a Powr Lok, I turned my bad ideas into bad actions and did the big thing.


It started off well and it wasn't too hard to pull everything out of the Jeep. I did have to get a bit creative with a screwdriver to stop the engine from turning over so that I could remove the OD bowl gear, as I had taken off the driveshafts and parking brake cable first, and the Dauntless couldn't hold itsself tight enough for me to break the nut loose.

After that came a LOT of cleaning. Man, I never knew something could get that greasy. I started off trying to wipe it off with a rag and some parts cleaner, but quickly gave up on that alone. Next up, I pulled out a scraper to get the big stuff off, and tried again with the rag. When that didn't work, I eventually resorted to the horrendously messy but effective method of running it over with a drill-mounted wire wheel after spraying it with parts cleaner and letting it sit for 5 minutes. I had to clear out a bit of a corner of the shop and surround it on 3 sides with cardboard (also covering the floor of course) so I didn't get grease splattering everywhere. I think I killed about 5 shirts to clean up those parts in total.

After I got a good bit of the grease off, I disassembled the whole case and started on doing a good cleaning on the single parts. Most of the gasket surfaces had crap stuck on them too so I (not wanting to run over them with the wire wheel for fear of digging too deep and causing more leaks) spent lots of time on it with a hand wire brush, gasket remover, and a razor blade trying to get a clean surface. It worked out in the end, and most of the gasketed surfaces are sealed up just fine.

Next up, I got all the parts masked off with painters tape, a scalpel, and some patience. That was one of the more fun parts of the rebuild for me. I'm not much of a nice paint guy, but it was a fun little project to do, knowing that it would give an exact edge when everything was painted. I sprayed it with some blue Rustoleum, somewhat intending and completely failing to match the color that the case was before a dumb kid (me) got ahold of it. I chose to spray the parking brake and shift levers in black Rustoleum.

After that was finished, I had a good bit of cleanup left to do inside the case and other parts. Once that was finished, I moved to clearance the case for the 3.15s that I chose to go with. (Yep, made a mess right after I cleaned it up, I know...) After that was done, I moved on to the fun part of reassembly. I'd like to say that it went smoothly, but I hit many problems with reassembly. Just about every day somebody would ask me how it was going and how hard it was going to be. I would tell them that the next part should be easy. Then the next part took an entire day to sort out. Every. Single. Time. I guess I haven't truly learned that car guy superstition just yet. My first fumble-up was installing the shift rail 180 degrees off where it should have been. I barely caught it right before I dressed up the front gasket with aviation gasket maker, and it took a solid 2.5 hours for me to get it apart and changed around. After that, I managed to toast a shift-rail seal, upon which I pried it out with a screwdriver, hammered it flat with the first hammer I could find, and threw it across the room. I'm meaning to make a sort of trophy-case of crap I've screwed up or garbage parts that have caused me problems, like the interlock pill that caused me about 5 hours of trouble trying to remove the front output. But I digress. Eventually, I got the mainshaft and gears in, chopped the 4wd shift rail after I almost forgot it, and got the front output back on.

The next little bit of assembly was definitely the most intimidating to me; figuring out the shim pack and setting end play. Though I was quite worried about this step, it didn't turn out to be too much of a pain. It took time and a few resets, but eventually I got the play to 0.006, which turned into about 0.0055 when finally assembled (after I ran the shims over with spray-copper). I bought some NOS shims from Kaiser Willys for this project, and was utterly amazed by how well these shims cleaned up with a simple wipe from a clean rag. I'm not sure how old these are, but I'm astounded by how well the wax-paper has preserved these shims.
After the shim pack was set, I moved on to getting the intermediate gear and shaft installed. I managed to forget to buy a piece of PVC to hold the needle bearings in, but I was able to keep them in place with trans assembly goo long enough to get the intermediate shaft in.

After that was all put together, I tackled the Overdrive. Unfortunately, after many years of the PTO bouncing up and down under the Jeep and using the adapter as a lever arm, the holes in the back of the case were pretty boogered up, and one had already been drilled and tapped to a bigger bolt. I spent a good 2 hours trying to fix those threads, but ended up completely destroying them. That looked like it was going to be the end of the project, but I emailed Sal from Vintage Jeeper and he had an old Warn case back that I was able to buy off of him to keep this project going. One thing I overlooked was the locking ring that was thoroughly secured in the rear case cover. There was no way I would have gotten it out by conventional means, so I had to do some work with a dremel and carefully grind down a flat spot to pull out that locking ring, because I couldn't afford to trash the ring as I wouldn't have time to get a new one. After that was done, the OD went back together easily, although I was unable to replace one of the mainshaft bearings because it is held in with a pencil-thick lock ring that I couldn't get off for the life of me. Other than that, it went together alright but I didn't have time to paint it.

Finally everything was ready, so I pulled another late-night and got everything back on the Jeep. I learned that night that the mosquitos in our neighborhood are really bad from 2130-2330, and re-learned it when I had to power-scrub the grease off my legs in the shower that night. Everything seemed to go together just fine, and I only had one small problem with a blocking ring misaligned in the OD on my first try. So it all seemed good at the time.

The next day is when the problems showed themselves. Everything seemed fine at first, but when I was trying to run through the process to fill the OD with gear oil the OD wouldn't shift all the way into OD mode. It would hit direct and neutral just fine, but I would push it forward and it would grind a tad as I let off the clutch before falling back to neutral. I figured I had the shifter detent ball too tight, so I crawled under the Jeep and loosened it. It shifted just fine in the driveway, so I decided to take it around the block. Then I realized that my parking brake was acting up and was somehow rubbing badly, even though it was loose enough that the lever arm hit the Novak pan before actually tightening the brakes all the way. So, having no time left to screw with it, I crawled under the Jeep and loosened it all the way up, in the hopes that my Dad could still drive it around to keep it in good order while I'm gone. With that problem "fixed", I decided to take it around the block again. It worked fine for the first 2 minutes, and then the OD wouldn't shift into OD again. And then it wouldn't shift out of direct at all. I also noticed that there's a bad-sounding chatter on deceleration, regardless of transmission gear or hi-low range. By then I was completely out of time to work on it, so I had to leave it as-is. That really put a bummer on the whole thing. But the project was very fun for the most part, and I think I learned a good bit (now if I can learn what I screwed up). I may start a dedicated thread to try and figure out/solve the problems I've just made for myself, but there's nothing I can do about it for the time being because I can't work on it for a good while.

 

Good job getting all that work done. Bummer than some more fine tuning is required. You'll get it figured out when you get back to it. Especially with the help of the forum.

 

And don't beat yourself up. Half the stuff I work on doesn't work right out of the box either. it's a process....

 

One thing I forgot to add was the state of the T86 magnet...not gouda at all. My speedo broke so I don't know exactly how many miles were on it since I cleaned it off, but it was definitely less than 1k, probably around 500. And there's another chunk of gear. Not gouda...

 

Between the time when I updated this thread last and now, I've decided to attempt a 4-speed swap on the Jeep. That'll be starting up hopefully in 2-weeks or so.

Since this will be a big project, I've decided that I'll only make a post or two on this thread after I'm done with (or after I run out of time on) the swap, and I'll do a sort of write up on how it all went and what I did. The specifics of the swap and part-by-part documentation (however in-depth that ends up being) will be here: http://www.earlycj5.com/xf_cj5/index.php?threads/160708/

 

I don't see any mention of swapping out the bowl gear in the Overdrive. Did you get the proper bowl gear for the OD to use with the 3.15 gears or did you re-use the old one? If you re-used the old one, that's your issue.

 

I did get and swap the correct bowl gear. Good thought though.

I believe I posted what I found during my recent teardown in prep for a 4-speed swap; the OD synchro was crushed and bulged out in 3 spots due to me misaligning it at first install. There are three spots on the syncrho cone that were obviously wearing and contacting, while a majority of the synchro wasn't contacting anything. I believe this didn't allow it to shift all the way into gear also.

 

Pic of that, since I forgot to post it at first: