The reason for this thread is to get some ideas of where I should be going.
For the TLWR (Too Long Won't Read) group: My CJ5 that I built from 2 other CJ5s (one of which may have come form more than one), me selling it, at least three other owners with the latest owner racing it for 18 years and me owning it again.
Long version:
I guess I'll start at the very beginning when I traded a ratty 1972 Chevy C10 for what seemed like a good looking blue 1977 Levi’s CJ5 that was impounded because the idiot that owned it thought it was a good idea to drive over a bunch of stop signs and ended up with a DWI (Driving While Intoxicated back then). I paid $125 to get it out of impound and towed it home with the Chevy because it had a hole in the oil pan from one of the signs. After also paying for both title transfer fees I went back home, got underneath and saw that the hole was more like a horizontal slice about an inch long and it was a good 1 ½ inches above the little “skid plate” the factory had attached to the bottom of the straight 6 oil pan. I grabbed my dad’s oxy acetylene torch and a coat hanger, welded it up, added a couple quarts of oil and fired it up while watching the gauge and listening for who knows what. The pressure was good and there were no bad sounds. While it was fairly rare for me to ever see the guy I got it from, we saw each other while I was driving to my afternoon shift about 2 hours after we made the trade. I was in the 1977 CJ and he was in that Chevy, which FWIW, I bought off him a year or so earlier for $25 and put a late 60s Buick V8 and turbo 400 in to get it on the road. He was really happy about getting it back in running condition but didn’t look very happy then. Oh well, it wasn’t long after that, that I found out his grandfather’s repaint on the Jeep was over “bondo only” patched holes on the outside and I could easily drop a 12 pack of cans through either side of the floor to get immediately crushed by either rear tire. While it only had about 75,000 miles, it needed some major help.
After having it about 2 months a friend of mine told me about one of his coworkers that had a CJ5 with a fiberglass body that had some front end damage and a broken frame. I think the owner was moving out of state in 2 days and if I wanted it I needed to give him $500 if he had it towed to my friends house before he left. I told him OK but I wasn’t really planning on giving him anything if it wasn’t worth it. When it got there I saw a maroon CJ5 with a suspension and a body lift, a full roll cage, the 304 V8, a late 60s Ford hood scoop, a wooden dashboard and some weird square flush tail lights that I never knew for sure what they were from until last year. The frame was broke on both sides right under the firewall, a push bar that was welded to the bumper, and too wide to begin with, was smashing both front fenders, the fuel line had broken with the frame and the clutch linkage was not functional. Otherwise it looked better than my 1977 CJ and I laid the money down. It turns out if I wanted the top I’d need to come up with another $100. Somehow we got to $75 and we made that deal the next day and he moved away. Based on the huge rush and that I was just planning on using it for parts I never ended up getting the title so I’ll just call it a 1972 CJ5. As a side note, I was told this was a great price because he was looking to get $3500 for it before the wreck.
It only took a couple of days to get the frame jacked up fairly straight and tack welded back together and the fuel line and clutch good enough to get it to my dad’s garage to take apart to fix the 1977 CJ. Unfortunately, as luck would find it, the 1977 CJ had more rust in the frame than first noticed while the broken frame had no real rust to worry about, which made it clear that the broken frame and the fiberglass body had to stay together. It was also at this point that I found out there was a huge difference between the early and late 1970s bodies, frames and other stuff.
The first thing I was going to do was replace the wooden dashboard with the 1977 dashboard. While doing this I found out that the entire wiring was done by someone that didn’t even solder anything and there were no fuses anywhere. This meant that the entire wiring harness needed to come out of the 1977 CJ. This meant I had to cut a square hole in the firewall to mount the fuse box through allowing access to plug the under hood wiring harness into. I sure didn’t expect the 1977 CJ fuse box to be identical to the 1972 Chevy that I already mentioned working on but it certainly was. Also, since the steering columns were considerably different where they go through the dashboard and the turn signal switch and ignition switch(now in the column) plugged in differently, the 1977 steering column had to be installed. To do that, all the bracketry that holds both the column and the clutch and brake pedals needed to come from the 1977. This bracketry needed modified to fit between the firewall and dashboard, I’m not sure if it was due to the different years or going from a steel to a fiberglass body.
Also, when I drove it to dad’s, the transmission didn’t shift too good and the front axle needed ball joints, both were replaced with those that came from the 1977 CJ. For the record, the rear axle was better than the 1977 AMC 20 but the gear ratios didn’t match. I was going to get new ball joints on the original front axle eventually and put it back in but never got around to it. Off road the different ratios didn’t seem to matter. While doing all this, my dad looked at the frame and said it broke where it did because it was only boxed back to that point. He then welded in panels that gave us a fully boxed frame bumper to bumper. He also decided that a full roll cage mounted on a fiberglass body didn’t make any sense and built brackets to tie that cage into the frame in 6 places. This was done with the body still on so only about 90% of it was welded but it was still stronger at that time than the Jeep cages factory mounted to the bodies today. Considering all the parts that needed replaced I would have been really angry had I bought it anywhere near the $3500 asking price before the wreck.
With all that done I just needed to do something about the blue dashboard in the maroon and black CJ5. While I didn’t want to paint over the dashboard sticker with the 1977 VIN and I really liked yellow Jeeps, I decided to paint the Jeep yellow with blue trim. I kinda wish I would have painted over the blue dash, but it was what it was, at least everyone knew who was coming when they saw it.
Here’s a picture of my son and I in Sept 1991 which I’m pretty sure was about a year after starting the work and a few months of driving it.
Within a couple years the 304 dropped a valve on my way to work. With still a couple miles to go, I stopped in a Quick Stop, bought a couple quarts of oil and poured them in. I think I burned both quarts by the time I got to work with a 20 ft wide, 20 ft tall, 2 mile long cloud behind me. Luckily at that time I was on midnight shift so at least it was pretty dark outside while I made that cloud.
This resulted in the 6 cylinder from the 1977 CJ5 being added. I always thought it was a 258 but I’ve come to find out that it could have been a 232. Either way, it was a far better engine in every way, shape or form off road and even on road unless your main goal was to get pushed back in your seat taking off from a stop sign.
In 1996 with a growing family and some money needed for a down payment for a larger house, I decided to rebuild that CJ and sell it off. This time the body was removed, the frame was blasted, any welding that had been blocked by the body was completed and the whole frame was painted black along with everything that had been blue for too long. I also put a slightly bigger set of used tires on it.
I actually put it up for sale for $3500 in 1997. I had so many young people (kids?) that wanted it. I told everyone that looked at it that if they didn’t have another car to drive in bad weather they don’t really want this Jeep. I told them all that it slides around on just a wet road and it’s more like a street legal tractor than an off road truck. I also told them about the gear ratios and that the original front axle would come with it.
There was a teenager that lived on the road behind us that wanted it so bad. He got the same story as the rest of them got from me. He came over a bunch of times. For whatever reason I rode past his house and saw three 4x4 trucks. The next time he stopped by I asked about those and found out his father and two brothers owned them and they had relatives in West Virginia and went hunting down there quite a bit. I gave him the same story again but said I would sell it to him if his father checked it out and said OK. A couple days later it was sold for $3000.
This is a picture of my daughter at 13 months old while it was for sale in 1997.
Most stories would end right about here but I was riding through a random neighborhood in our town about 9 months later and saw it in a driveway with the rear end on jack stands and the rear tires/wheels laying on the ground on each side with both axle shafts still attached and pointing straight up. I almost just rode past but I figured it’s been long enough that I can’t be blamed for whatever is going on so I pulled in. There was someone underneath it as I walked up and I said, “What are you doing to my Jeep?” Some guy I never saw before rolled out really fast and said, “What are you talking about? This is my Jeep!” It turns out the kid I sold it to 9 months earlier had it for only 6 months before he realized how difficult it was to DD and sold it for $2000. I don’t remember what the new owner was doing to the axle but he already installed a new carburetor to fix some problem that I never had with it. I also asked him if he got the original front axle in the deal and he didn’t even know the axles on it didn’t match.
About 6 years later I ran into a guy I had gone to school with. Pat knew I had that CJ5 in the past and told me he was the current owner (at the time) and had used it for racing the prior 3 years. I knew where he grew up (roughly half way between the town I now live in and my mom’s house) and that he still worked on various vehicles there so I randomly drove by every once in a while and usually saw the CJ sitting on a trailer in front of his workshop.
Almost 15 years after that I found it for sale on Craigslist. The pictures showed it still on the trailer at Pat’s mom’s house. I drove past her house again, probably the first time in at least 5 years that I paid any attention , and there it was. This was a little over a year after I was in a bad car accident and probably had only been able to even drive again for a couple months, heck just using the computer at all was hard and something I had just started trying to do. I probably checked out that ad every day until it disappeared. A few days later I rode by Pat’s mom’s house and the trailer was empty. Oh well, I wonder if I’ll ever see it again. Who knows?
Fast forward a couple months. I’m looking at Craigslist and what do I find? That CJ5 for sale again. Well that’s pretty amazing, and what the heck, why is whoever bought it now selling it with the pictures from Pat’s ad? The next day I had to help my mom do something and drove past Pat’s mom’s on the way and there it was, back on the trailer like nothing had changed.
That evening when my wife got home I tried to read the ad to her. I couldn’t do it. I was mentally unable to physically read it out loud. This wasn’t the first time I had problems like this but this time she recorded me. She read the ad to me and I couldn’t even repeat what she was saying. I was able to tell her other things about the CJ5 but couldn’t say what was in the ad no matter what. This went on for at least a couple minutes then I was fine. Luckily this was the last time that happened, at least for the last 11 months so far.
The next day when my son got home from work she showed him the video because he never saw me having that issue. He watched the video, looked at me and said, “When are you buying that Jeep?” I’m not sure what he meant by that or why I had never thought of that myself but it got some wheels in my brain spinning and a few weeks later I bought that Jeep.
Pat delivered it to my house and handed me the title which he had already told me was never in his name but had been notarized. I looked at the back and couldn’t read the seller signature but it was notarized. Then I checked the owner’s name on the front. I didn’t recognize it so I looked at the previous owner name. I certainly recognized that one, it was mine. It turns out the notarized seller was the father of the kid I sold it to in 1997.
Pat also told me that the reason it seemed to be not for sale for a while was because someone was supposedly buying it but didn’t need the 4 barrel carb and the 4WD Hardware valve cover so it was in the garage getting those removed when I drove buy and it wasn’t on the trailer. Due to some money problems that guy never ended up actually buying it.
Here it is sitting at my house.
Somewhat different than when I sold it. The top, seats, gas tank, my 1977 engine and dashboard are missing. It’s has a different straight 6, a fuel cell, some purple flames on the hood and fenders, there are pieces added to the roll cage and it now has Jackman wheels.
After buying it last April I thought I was just going to restore it. Then after looking at how some things (soft tops and such) have changed over the years maybe I need to get it on/off the road, find out what it needs, replace that stuff then when it’s all figured out, tear it apart like I did in 1997 and rebuild it again. At this point I’m pretty sure getting everything right then rebuilding is the way I’m going to go but I’m not sure what it should even look like before or after the rebuild. Should I paint over the flames with somewhat matching yellow paint until the rebuild? Should I keep the purple flames on it forever in honor of its years of being raced? Any other ideas, crazy or not?
For the TLWR (Too Long Won't Read) group: My CJ5 that I built from 2 other CJ5s (one of which may have come form more than one), me selling it, at least three other owners with the latest owner racing it for 18 years and me owning it again.
Long version:
I guess I'll start at the very beginning when I traded a ratty 1972 Chevy C10 for what seemed like a good looking blue 1977 Levi’s CJ5 that was impounded because the idiot that owned it thought it was a good idea to drive over a bunch of stop signs and ended up with a DWI (Driving While Intoxicated back then). I paid $125 to get it out of impound and towed it home with the Chevy because it had a hole in the oil pan from one of the signs. After also paying for both title transfer fees I went back home, got underneath and saw that the hole was more like a horizontal slice about an inch long and it was a good 1 ½ inches above the little “skid plate” the factory had attached to the bottom of the straight 6 oil pan. I grabbed my dad’s oxy acetylene torch and a coat hanger, welded it up, added a couple quarts of oil and fired it up while watching the gauge and listening for who knows what. The pressure was good and there were no bad sounds. While it was fairly rare for me to ever see the guy I got it from, we saw each other while I was driving to my afternoon shift about 2 hours after we made the trade. I was in the 1977 CJ and he was in that Chevy, which FWIW, I bought off him a year or so earlier for $25 and put a late 60s Buick V8 and turbo 400 in to get it on the road. He was really happy about getting it back in running condition but didn’t look very happy then. Oh well, it wasn’t long after that, that I found out his grandfather’s repaint on the Jeep was over “bondo only” patched holes on the outside and I could easily drop a 12 pack of cans through either side of the floor to get immediately crushed by either rear tire. While it only had about 75,000 miles, it needed some major help.
After having it about 2 months a friend of mine told me about one of his coworkers that had a CJ5 with a fiberglass body that had some front end damage and a broken frame. I think the owner was moving out of state in 2 days and if I wanted it I needed to give him $500 if he had it towed to my friends house before he left. I told him OK but I wasn’t really planning on giving him anything if it wasn’t worth it. When it got there I saw a maroon CJ5 with a suspension and a body lift, a full roll cage, the 304 V8, a late 60s Ford hood scoop, a wooden dashboard and some weird square flush tail lights that I never knew for sure what they were from until last year. The frame was broke on both sides right under the firewall, a push bar that was welded to the bumper, and too wide to begin with, was smashing both front fenders, the fuel line had broken with the frame and the clutch linkage was not functional. Otherwise it looked better than my 1977 CJ and I laid the money down. It turns out if I wanted the top I’d need to come up with another $100. Somehow we got to $75 and we made that deal the next day and he moved away. Based on the huge rush and that I was just planning on using it for parts I never ended up getting the title so I’ll just call it a 1972 CJ5. As a side note, I was told this was a great price because he was looking to get $3500 for it before the wreck.
It only took a couple of days to get the frame jacked up fairly straight and tack welded back together and the fuel line and clutch good enough to get it to my dad’s garage to take apart to fix the 1977 CJ. Unfortunately, as luck would find it, the 1977 CJ had more rust in the frame than first noticed while the broken frame had no real rust to worry about, which made it clear that the broken frame and the fiberglass body had to stay together. It was also at this point that I found out there was a huge difference between the early and late 1970s bodies, frames and other stuff.
The first thing I was going to do was replace the wooden dashboard with the 1977 dashboard. While doing this I found out that the entire wiring was done by someone that didn’t even solder anything and there were no fuses anywhere. This meant that the entire wiring harness needed to come out of the 1977 CJ. This meant I had to cut a square hole in the firewall to mount the fuse box through allowing access to plug the under hood wiring harness into. I sure didn’t expect the 1977 CJ fuse box to be identical to the 1972 Chevy that I already mentioned working on but it certainly was. Also, since the steering columns were considerably different where they go through the dashboard and the turn signal switch and ignition switch(now in the column) plugged in differently, the 1977 steering column had to be installed. To do that, all the bracketry that holds both the column and the clutch and brake pedals needed to come from the 1977. This bracketry needed modified to fit between the firewall and dashboard, I’m not sure if it was due to the different years or going from a steel to a fiberglass body.
Also, when I drove it to dad’s, the transmission didn’t shift too good and the front axle needed ball joints, both were replaced with those that came from the 1977 CJ. For the record, the rear axle was better than the 1977 AMC 20 but the gear ratios didn’t match. I was going to get new ball joints on the original front axle eventually and put it back in but never got around to it. Off road the different ratios didn’t seem to matter. While doing all this, my dad looked at the frame and said it broke where it did because it was only boxed back to that point. He then welded in panels that gave us a fully boxed frame bumper to bumper. He also decided that a full roll cage mounted on a fiberglass body didn’t make any sense and built brackets to tie that cage into the frame in 6 places. This was done with the body still on so only about 90% of it was welded but it was still stronger at that time than the Jeep cages factory mounted to the bodies today. Considering all the parts that needed replaced I would have been really angry had I bought it anywhere near the $3500 asking price before the wreck.
With all that done I just needed to do something about the blue dashboard in the maroon and black CJ5. While I didn’t want to paint over the dashboard sticker with the 1977 VIN and I really liked yellow Jeeps, I decided to paint the Jeep yellow with blue trim. I kinda wish I would have painted over the blue dash, but it was what it was, at least everyone knew who was coming when they saw it.
Here’s a picture of my son and I in Sept 1991 which I’m pretty sure was about a year after starting the work and a few months of driving it.
Within a couple years the 304 dropped a valve on my way to work. With still a couple miles to go, I stopped in a Quick Stop, bought a couple quarts of oil and poured them in. I think I burned both quarts by the time I got to work with a 20 ft wide, 20 ft tall, 2 mile long cloud behind me. Luckily at that time I was on midnight shift so at least it was pretty dark outside while I made that cloud.
This resulted in the 6 cylinder from the 1977 CJ5 being added. I always thought it was a 258 but I’ve come to find out that it could have been a 232. Either way, it was a far better engine in every way, shape or form off road and even on road unless your main goal was to get pushed back in your seat taking off from a stop sign.
In 1996 with a growing family and some money needed for a down payment for a larger house, I decided to rebuild that CJ and sell it off. This time the body was removed, the frame was blasted, any welding that had been blocked by the body was completed and the whole frame was painted black along with everything that had been blue for too long. I also put a slightly bigger set of used tires on it.
I actually put it up for sale for $3500 in 1997. I had so many young people (kids?) that wanted it. I told everyone that looked at it that if they didn’t have another car to drive in bad weather they don’t really want this Jeep. I told them all that it slides around on just a wet road and it’s more like a street legal tractor than an off road truck. I also told them about the gear ratios and that the original front axle would come with it.
There was a teenager that lived on the road behind us that wanted it so bad. He got the same story as the rest of them got from me. He came over a bunch of times. For whatever reason I rode past his house and saw three 4x4 trucks. The next time he stopped by I asked about those and found out his father and two brothers owned them and they had relatives in West Virginia and went hunting down there quite a bit. I gave him the same story again but said I would sell it to him if his father checked it out and said OK. A couple days later it was sold for $3000.
This is a picture of my daughter at 13 months old while it was for sale in 1997.
Most stories would end right about here but I was riding through a random neighborhood in our town about 9 months later and saw it in a driveway with the rear end on jack stands and the rear tires/wheels laying on the ground on each side with both axle shafts still attached and pointing straight up. I almost just rode past but I figured it’s been long enough that I can’t be blamed for whatever is going on so I pulled in. There was someone underneath it as I walked up and I said, “What are you doing to my Jeep?” Some guy I never saw before rolled out really fast and said, “What are you talking about? This is my Jeep!” It turns out the kid I sold it to 9 months earlier had it for only 6 months before he realized how difficult it was to DD and sold it for $2000. I don’t remember what the new owner was doing to the axle but he already installed a new carburetor to fix some problem that I never had with it. I also asked him if he got the original front axle in the deal and he didn’t even know the axles on it didn’t match.
About 6 years later I ran into a guy I had gone to school with. Pat knew I had that CJ5 in the past and told me he was the current owner (at the time) and had used it for racing the prior 3 years. I knew where he grew up (roughly half way between the town I now live in and my mom’s house) and that he still worked on various vehicles there so I randomly drove by every once in a while and usually saw the CJ sitting on a trailer in front of his workshop.
Almost 15 years after that I found it for sale on Craigslist. The pictures showed it still on the trailer at Pat’s mom’s house. I drove past her house again, probably the first time in at least 5 years that I paid any attention , and there it was. This was a little over a year after I was in a bad car accident and probably had only been able to even drive again for a couple months, heck just using the computer at all was hard and something I had just started trying to do. I probably checked out that ad every day until it disappeared. A few days later I rode by Pat’s mom’s house and the trailer was empty. Oh well, I wonder if I’ll ever see it again. Who knows?
Fast forward a couple months. I’m looking at Craigslist and what do I find? That CJ5 for sale again. Well that’s pretty amazing, and what the heck, why is whoever bought it now selling it with the pictures from Pat’s ad? The next day I had to help my mom do something and drove past Pat’s mom’s on the way and there it was, back on the trailer like nothing had changed.
That evening when my wife got home I tried to read the ad to her. I couldn’t do it. I was mentally unable to physically read it out loud. This wasn’t the first time I had problems like this but this time she recorded me. She read the ad to me and I couldn’t even repeat what she was saying. I was able to tell her other things about the CJ5 but couldn’t say what was in the ad no matter what. This went on for at least a couple minutes then I was fine. Luckily this was the last time that happened, at least for the last 11 months so far.
The next day when my son got home from work she showed him the video because he never saw me having that issue. He watched the video, looked at me and said, “When are you buying that Jeep?” I’m not sure what he meant by that or why I had never thought of that myself but it got some wheels in my brain spinning and a few weeks later I bought that Jeep.
Pat delivered it to my house and handed me the title which he had already told me was never in his name but had been notarized. I looked at the back and couldn’t read the seller signature but it was notarized. Then I checked the owner’s name on the front. I didn’t recognize it so I looked at the previous owner name. I certainly recognized that one, it was mine. It turns out the notarized seller was the father of the kid I sold it to in 1997.
Pat also told me that the reason it seemed to be not for sale for a while was because someone was supposedly buying it but didn’t need the 4 barrel carb and the 4WD Hardware valve cover so it was in the garage getting those removed when I drove buy and it wasn’t on the trailer. Due to some money problems that guy never ended up actually buying it.
Here it is sitting at my house.
Somewhat different than when I sold it. The top, seats, gas tank, my 1977 engine and dashboard are missing. It’s has a different straight 6, a fuel cell, some purple flames on the hood and fenders, there are pieces added to the roll cage and it now has Jackman wheels.
After buying it last April I thought I was just going to restore it. Then after looking at how some things (soft tops and such) have changed over the years maybe I need to get it on/off the road, find out what it needs, replace that stuff then when it’s all figured out, tear it apart like I did in 1997 and rebuild it again. At this point I’m pretty sure getting everything right then rebuilding is the way I’m going to go but I’m not sure what it should even look like before or after the rebuild. Should I paint over the flames with somewhat matching yellow paint until the rebuild? Should I keep the purple flames on it forever in honor of its years of being raced? Any other ideas, crazy or not?
