Two For One—A Go Fast TJ and J10 Build

Trevlaw

Sketchy Machinist
Supporting Member
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678
Location
Corvallis, OR
Hello everyone, some of you might remember me from Jeepforum and my Wingnut Build, I kind of stopped updating it after a while and lost interest in that forum. Trying to get back into the swing of things and figured this might help keep me a little motivated to get my projects done. It’s good to be back.

I never stopped working on the Jeep though, in fact I bought a second one. A 1979 J10 that was running when I hauled it home, the plan being to drive it around while I worked on the TJ, though things never seem to go according to plan. I drove it around for a little bit, getting to know the good and bad of my biggest purchase ever. Originally I replaced the main and rod bearings, the oil pump, fixed all the leaky gaskets, rebuilt the carb and with the help of my grandpa got everything running really well, nice quiet idle, very smooth even if it only had 80hp.

Then I learned what blow by is, and why I should’ve investigated that before fixing everything else. After sealing up all of the engines oil leaks, it began to come up and out of the dipstick tube, after riggin up a hose to a catch can from the junk yard, I was able to drive about 15 miles or so before needing to stop and dump 2 quarts of oil from the catch can back into the motor, not a very long term solution.

So I scrapped that plan, bought a gen 3 4.8 LS, 2wd 4l60e, harness and all the necessary swap parts off of craigslist with about 180k miles. New plan, rebuild the motor and swap everything into the truck. Blew the motor apart down to the bare block, bagged and tagged everything, and began to realize the motor needed a decent amount of machine work, and that I wasn’t going to convince myself to put it back together without a fair amount of new parts and machine work. I still have my spreadsheet of parts for a bored out 5.1, totalling a couple grand in parts, tucked away here on my laptop.

New plan, found another 4.8 on CL, 90k miles, pulled from a running chevelle in favor or a new 6.0. Drove 5 hours down and hauled it back home in the back of the TJ for just $500. It is currently sitting in the truck with a 2wd 4l60e that may or may not work. Got it mounted with some Advanced Adapter Motor mounts for a CJ I think, they were for a frame width an inch narrower than mine, stacked some plates on the inside of my frame rails and milled out the slots at work a bit to get my some extra width.

That was about a year ago, I’ve made some progress on the fuel system, wiring harness, exhaust and some other parts of the swap since then, I’ll detail those in future posts. It’s a long project, but I’m finally setup to start working on it again here shortly, for now here’s some pics of the truck when I bought it a few years ago. Yes that’s black bedliner, yes I absolutely hate it, and yes it’s a giant PITA to remove.

P.S. still trying to figure out the pictures, sorry if there huge lol
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I love J trucks. I haven't gotten one... Yet. Buddy of mine has a 3/4 ton that he bought and hasn't worked in in forever. I'm waiting for him to decide he needs to sell it. Came from Georgia, so it's real clean.
 
Once you upload pictures, you can either insert them as full size or thumbnail. Either works just fine to be honest.

Anyways, welcome to the forum and very cool truck, I really dig that thing. Once that thing is up and running with the LS it's going to be awesome. I look forward to following this thread (y)
 
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I love J trucks. I haven't gotten one... Yet. Buddy of mine has a 3/4 ton that he bought and hasn't worked in in forever. I'm waiting for him to decide he needs to sell it. Came from Georgia, so it's real clean
Nice, yeah it took me a while to find this one, had to drive about 8 hours to pick it up too. A J20 with the longer wheelbase would be really nice, I'm keeping my eye out for some step side fenders for it as well
 
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Once you upload pictures, you can either insert them as full size or thumbnail. Either works just fine to be honest.

Anyways, welcome to the forum and very cool truck, I really dig that thing. Once that thing is up and running with the LS it's going to be awesome. I look forward to following this thread (y)
Thanks Chris, glad to be here. I've been curious, did you ever sell a used Dana 30 Truetrac to kid with a blue jeep in Salem? If so, that'd be me, just wondering if I can put a face to the name or if it was someone else
 
Thanks Chris, glad to be here. I've been curious, did you ever sell a used Dana 30 Truetrac to kid with a blue jeep in Salem? If so, that'd be me, just wondering if I can put a face to the name or if it was someone else

Nope, I did not. I lived in though from May of 2016 to June of 2020 before moving to Arizona. Before Salem I lives in Beaverton.

It's possible we may have crossed paths at some point however (y)
 
As far as the TJ is concerned, it’s a pretty long story. It was my first vehicle courtesy of my parents when I was 15, almost 23 now and 100k miles later it has changed quite a bit. I will link my old thread from JF if anyone is interested, but there’s a lot of talking and not much building going on, hopefully this one will be different. If you have any questions about it, feel free to ask. I’ll just list it’s current setup for now.

  • 4.0 straight six, 142k miles
  • Savvy 1.25” BL and JKS 1” MML
  • 32rh with an NP231 and JB Conversions SS SYE
  • Tom Woods Double Cardan 1310 Rear shaft clearanced for 35* of maximum angle. Currently at 21* operating angle, lasts about 6 months before the centering ball falls out lol
  • Ford 8.8 with the Yukon Ultimate 88 Kit, Artec bracket swap kit, 4.56 gears, a leaky ARB and Riddler Cover
  • Bent Rubicon 44 front axle, used Nitro Chromo axles, 4.56 gears and an ARB, factory cover
  • Second set of 33” Duratracs, got 80k miles out of the first set, fingers crossed for these ones. 15” MB72 Wheels.
  • Currently no engine or tranny skid plates, I have a DIY tummy tuck with a shitty crossmember I made with a modified factory transmission mount to make it low profile. Need to redo the crossmember and make skids some time, but right now everything is tucked up above the bottom of the frame.
  • Savvy Aluminum gas tank skid
  • Currie Front Antirock stuck on the lowest setting for now. Have a rear antirock that I’ve been meaning to put on, but that project started a year and a half ago...
  • Savvy Mid arm suspension, Currie 4” coils in the front, the 21” free length ones or however long they are, the LJ Currie 4.5” coils in the back with relocated upper perches.
  • Fox 2.0x13 RR shocks in the front, about 6.5” up an down. Soon to be replaced with a set of 2.5x10 single comp tube bypasses that I can hopefully turn into 11’s
  • Fox 2.5x12 RR coilovers that I run as smooth bodies in the back. 8” of up travel and 4” down. Going to try grinding the frame soon so I can pull the spacers out of them and make them 13’s for an extra inch of down travel.
  • Recently replaced flowmaster Catalytic Converters with a 40 Series Delta flow muffler. Fighting exhaust leaks due to mounting it to rigidly to keep my driveshaft from putting a hole in the downpipe like the last one.
  • Old 33” duratrac spare with a recently installed exogate. Never extended the snubbers on my old 31” and bent the tailgate pretty good.
  • DIY sliders and front bumper I made in HS shop class. Smittybilt winch and Trucklite LED headlights up front.
  • Inside Audio - Powerbass 5 channel amp pushing 250w to a JL 8w3 in the Center console, and 100w to two Hertz HSK 5.25” in the dash and two Hertz MPK 6.5” in the sound bar with a Kenwood HU. Have a Pioneer DEH-80PRS that I’ve been meaning to swap in

I’m sure I missed some stuff, but that should help give an idea of where I’m at, but it’s no where near close to finished and probably never will be

That second picture is my last time out at KOH, immediately after I bent my front Dana 44. Was bombing down one of the roads out there that I hadn't run before, doing about 50mph when two other dirt roads crossed mine back to back, shocks kinda packed up after the first road, hit the second one and got probably at least 2 feet of air, landed all on the left front. Knocked a transmission cooler line loose, sprayed ATF everywhere and I smoked my way back to camp. The jumps I hit before that one, when I was planning on it, those were super cushy lol, I had the shocks dialed.

Last pic is the Jeep in my new shop I'm renting, it is now full of tools, most of which I'll try to highlight sometime later on

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Back to the truck, I haven't made a ton of progress, but this weekend I'm going to try and get my fuel system in for the final installation. These are older pictures from when I started making it.

To start off, first thing I had to do was pull the bed off of the frame for easy access to everything. The truck's frame seems to be pretty solid, just some decent surface rust, although I did snap off most of the bolts holding the bed on. With all the bolts broken, and just one shitty harbor freight cherry picker I got to work.
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Once I figured out how to arrange my limited selection of straps for an even pick, it started pretty smoothly. You can see in the background I had already removed most of the front body panels and started cleaning them up. Hooked the TJ up to the front of the truck and pulled it out from under the bed.

Turns out a maxed out shitty cherry picker sideways on a downward slope isn't very stable.
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What you can't see are both inner and outer front fenders that are directly underneath the bed lol. Somehow I managed not to damage those to much. Both front lower corners of the bed are pretty bent to shit now, so I'll have some good body work practice ahead of me.

Either way, mission accomplished
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I whipped up a quick cross member for the TJ gas tank skid to bolt to in the rear, and mounted the front to the existing J truck cross member.
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My Jerry rig drill press setup, actually worked a lot better than I expected to. This is one of my favorite drills, it's an old Black and Decker reversible drill I picked up off craigslist, had to search through this guy's entire back yard, basically a hoarder, completely stuffed to the brim with old stuff, tarps over everything. Picked this drill and some milwaukee hole hawgs up for cheap, along with my very first roper whitney hole punch, but more on those later
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I got the extra TJ tank when I bought my Savvy TJ gas tank skid on craigslist, and just used my old factory skid with the extra tank. The tank didn't come with a pump though. From what I remember I don't think I found any aftermarket or replacement pumps that seemed to be as good as the factory one, or maybe I was just being cheap, but I picked one up off ebay for like $50. Hopefully it works.

For the LS swap, IIRC the gen 3 motor needs at least 60 PSI of fuel pressure from the pump. The factory TJ pump is plenty capable of putting out 60 PSI, but the built in fuel pressure regulator on it is set below 60, so that had to go. One of my friends has done a few LS swaps at this point, at least one into his TJ. Well I'm basically copying what he did and using his extra parts, but he designed and machined a stainless steel part that goes in place of the FPR on the factory TJ pump. All it does is eliminate the bottleneck allowing the full 60+PSI to the motor and adapt to an AN fitting at the the tank. I don't seem to have a picture of the part, you can see some of it here where it necks down to connect to the actual pump. This is the factory setup
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This is with the new part installed. A few modifications to the plastic housing are necessary. Definitely not fun trying to fixture and drill this plastic after it's been sitting in a gas tank getting more and more brittle for 100k miles, but I managed not to break it.
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One other function of the factory FPR, is it redirects all of the unnecessary fuel back into the tank immediately and actually dumps it straight into the metal reservoir around the pump, both cooling the pump and allowing you to use basically every last drop in the tank.

With my 4.8, I have the earlier style of fuel system on the LS that has the vacuum operated pressure regulator and return line coming back from the motor opposed to the later style returnless setup that is more similar to the TJ setup. What my friend did with his swap was drill a hole in the top of the plastic housing for a bulkhead AN fitting that would serve as the return for the tank, which is what I did. However, I was a bit concerned about the returning fuel no longer being dumped directly into the reservoir with the new setup, he hasn't had any problems on his, but it's more of a buggy than a DD and I had an idea.
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I still used the same bulkhead AN fitting, but I just bought an extra 45* fitting, did a little measuring of how tall the pump is when it is collapsed in tank during installation, and drilled a hole in the reservoir about where I think it should line up. So ideally most of my extra fuel coming in the return line should make it through the hole and into the reservoir, not sure if it's necessary, but I figure it can't hurt anything
 
Finally started working on the truck again, feels good. Got my transmission heat shield finished up, as well as the exhaust hangers downturns. So aside from paint, the exhaust is done. Also got the fuel lines mounted up and done as well. Unfortunately my phone takes ridiculously shitty pictures, but I've got a charger on the way for an old digital camera that should work a lot better. So I'll try to get those up next week.

In the meantime, here's the behemoth of a welding table I finally finished up a few weeks ago. Made of two separate 5/8" plates for the top that give me a 48" x 48" top. Mounted on three pieces of 6" I beam with those on 2 pieces of 12" W beam and 3" .250" wall square tube for legs with solid cast iron casters. All bought off craigslist or from my local scrap yard, only about $700 or so into all of the materials

How it started, a lot of rusty I beam

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Going to town with one of my favorite tools, and an absolute life saver for this project. My old BUX cast aluminum mag drill with a Rockwell drill motor. Dovetailed ways with adjust brass gibs, 3/4" Jacobs chuck with about a 250 rpm speed and a full 10" of stroke. Looking forward to restoring it and it needs a new spindle now, I dropped it during this project I'm pretty sure I bent the spindle. Nothing I can't make on the lathe at work though.

Spot drill, pilot drill, drill, repeat...
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I made a jig out of some aluminum at work on the bridgeport for drilling all of the beams. Just a squared up rectangle with my 4 bolt pattern in it, with a transfer punch machined to be a tight slip fit in the jig. Definitely saved me a ton of time laying out holes and helped ensure everything lined up nicely.
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Mocking up the legs on some flanges I made out of 1/4" plate with two small gussets per leg.

I used the aluminum jig to layout the holes on the 1/4" plate, but I didn't drill the holes. Another one of my favorite tools, is the Roper Whitney Model 20 Hole Punch. It will punch up to 20 tons, meaning a 1/2" hole through 1/2" plate. this video is a 1/2" hole through the 1/4" with pretty minimal effort, it would be easier if I had it mounted to the table with a new punch, instead of a dull one mounted in a swivel vise.

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Just center punch where you want the hole, line it up and pull the handle


It makes pretty quick work of 16 half inch holes, with a nice round, on size, burr free hole

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I'm definitely not a welder by trade, but this project gave me some good learning experiences.
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A quick and easy angle iron shelf on the bottom

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Some 1" hex bolts for leveling feet. I wasn't happy with the clearance between the head and the ground with these after it was done. Planning on making my own leveling feet out of some stainless on the lathe at work

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I was pretty happy with some of these open corners, others not so much.

Caster brackets being mocked up out of 5/16" plate from the scrap yard. Probably overkill, but they had to stick out a ways to clear the swivel radius on the casters. I drilled and tapped some 1/2"-13 holes in this aluminum plate, bolted the brackets to it and clamped the brackets and plate to the top of the W beam to try and keep them flat. They still warped, and I beat them back straight with a hammer, just a poor design on my part.

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Giving my Hobart 190 a work out

Took them in to work to straighten out some poor angle grinder cuts and try to make sure the caster mounting pad is as parallel to the ground as possible

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Made an aluminum angle plate out of some scrap at work, its clamped to the square tube above the caster bracket. Also the only pick of the casters I have right now, 6" x 2" cast iron wheels with a 3/8" plate and two rings of ball bearings for the swivel portion with a needle bearing setup on the axle, beefiest one's I've ever had. Got a set of 4 swivels at the scrap yard for $100
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Some pretty shitty welds. Tried to get the vertical up figured out, but nothing was working for me. A lot of these I went back and ground out to redo, though the vertical down didn't go a whole lot better. Oh well, I don't think they're going anywhere and I was a couple months into this table already, I needed to get it done.


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Finally flipped up on its wheels

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Drilling the mounting holes for the two top pieces, and counter boring them for some 1/2" low profile socket head cap bolts
As of right now I have the top completely bolted to the table, I've gone through and shimmed it twice with some various shims I made from .010" stock. I've got the top flat within about .025" with my shitty straight edge, but I'm pretty happy with it for now.

After I get the BUX mag drill spindle fixed and the whole drill tightened up I will be drilling and reaming some 5/8" into the top to use this as a fixture table, but for now I've got other things I need to work on. I'm missing a few of the final pics, I'll get some next weekend, but it's all pretty now after a nice coat of Rustoleum Hammered Gray

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If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to ask.

To be continued...
 
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Here is my finished fuel system setup for the truck. Stainless 3/8" hard lines with AN flares made with the Eastwood tube flaring tool. I'm normally not much of a fan of Eastwood tools, but the tube flaring tool worked really well, was super easy to use and made a nice uniform flare, I don't think I even messed a single one up. I used all Fragola AN fittings besides the LS Intake Fuel rail adapters, those were from Russel. At the time Fragola seemed to have the best selection of PTFE Fittings and hoses and they weren't too outrageous on the price, but it still hurts.
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A quick and dirty tool I made to straighten the 20 foot coils of 3/8" stainless tubing. Machined some aluminum, used some random pulleys I found at the hardware store with the same radius. Worked alright, needed a heavier table to mount it too and a way to power at least one of the drive pulleys.
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Pay no attention to the numerous self tapping sheet metal screws poking through the floor...

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TJ gas tank and skid, TJ factory pump with custom fuel pressure regulator delete and fuel return line bulkhead fitting

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All of the brackets are custom. The little two line clamps and the big fuel filter clamp I made manually on one of the CNC vertical mills I used to run. The four line clamps on the frame I made a program and ran multiple sets of those on the CNC Mill. All 6061 aluminum anodized black with stainless hardware. Not sure what happened with the filter, it was centered in the clamp when I had it all mocked up last year, but I don't see anything out of place now...

All of the stainless braided lines are covered in a clear, non adhesive lined, heat shrink I found on McMaster last year. The lines up front have heat shrink as well as some heat shield from DEI and vulcanizing tape sealing it up. Was a little concerned with how close they run to the exhaust, hopefully this should keep everything cool and safe.
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A stack of clamps

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For mounting these clamps to the frame, I made up some simple 16 gauge brackets for the clamps to bolt to. The brackets have stainless 1/4-20 nutserts in them. I decided to get some hexagonal bodied nutserts and a custom ordered punch and die set for my Roper Whitney Model 218 punch. This one only does 4 tons, but has a huge 12" throat depth. The punch is only a few thou larger than the body of the nutsert, so if the nutserts ever lose their clamp, they still won't be able to spin in the hole. Also got to play around with my TMR dimple dies a bit
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The exhaust is all finished up, just need to paint it. I may try sandblasting it before painting to see if I have a little better luck with the VHT paint sticking. This is the crossover I made, with a single hanger that bolts to the single stud coming out of the 4l60E transmission mount. All 2.5" tubing with marman flanges from the local GBE Mandrel. I'm running these same clamps on the TJ and so far they've worked very well. I cheaped out and got mild steel tubing, but rust isn't really a problem up here, just needs some paint.
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This is the heat shield I made for the 4l60E pan, as the crossover runs underneath the back half of the pan. All 16 gauge, just bent the main sheet in about the same profile as the pan. Then I clamped it to the bottom of the pan with 1/8" spacers and a floor jack while I made the 4 slotted bolt mounts. It just mounts off of 4 of the transmission pan bolts. The stock bolts have a captured washer underneath the head of the bolt, I made this so the slotted mounts go between the head of the bolt and the captured washer, so when torqued the heat shield doesn't affect where the pressure is applied to the pan and gasket underneath, so hopefully it won't leak. I have some really thin adhesive backed heat shield from DEI that I will be applying to the shield after I get it painted.

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Hello everyone, some of you might remember me from Jeepforum and my Wingnut Build, I kind of stopped updating it after a while and lost interest in that forum. Trying to get back into the swing of things and figured this might help keep me a little motivated to get my projects done. It’s good to be back.

I never stopped working on the Jeep though, in fact I bought a second one. A 1979 J10 that was running when I hauled it home, the plan being to drive it around while I worked on the TJ, though things never seem to go according to plan. I drove it around for a little bit, getting to know the good and bad of my biggest purchase ever. Originally I replaced the main and rod bearings, the oil pump, fixed all the leaky gaskets, rebuilt the carb and with the help of my grandpa got everything running really well, nice quiet idle, very smooth even if it only had 80hp.

Then I learned what blow by is, and why I should’ve investigated that before fixing everything else. After sealing up all of the engines oil leaks, it began to come up and out of the dipstick tube, after riggin up a hose to a catch can from the junk yard, I was able to drive about 15 miles or so before needing to stop and dump 2 quarts of oil from the catch can back into the motor, not a very long term solution.

So I scrapped that plan, bought a gen 3 4.8 LS, 2wd 4l60e, harness and all the necessary swap parts off of craigslist with about 180k miles. New plan, rebuild the motor and swap everything into the truck. Blew the motor apart down to the bare block, bagged and tagged everything, and began to realize the motor needed a decent amount of machine work, and that I wasn’t going to convince myself to put it back together without a fair amount of new parts and machine work. I still have my spreadsheet of parts for a bored out 5.1, totalling a couple grand in parts, tucked away here on my laptop.

New plan, found another 4.8 on CL, 90k miles, pulled from a running chevelle in favor or a new 6.0. Drove 5 hours down and hauled it back home in the back of the TJ for just $500. It is currently sitting in the truck with a 2wd 4l60e that may or may not work. Got it mounted with some Advanced Adapter Motor mounts for a CJ I think, they were for a frame width an inch narrower than mine, stacked some plates on the inside of my frame rails and milled out the slots at work a bit to get my some extra width.

That was about a year ago, I’ve made some progress on the fuel system, wiring harness, exhaust and some other parts of the swap since then, I’ll detail those in future posts. It’s a long project, but I’m finally setup to start working on it again here shortly, for now here’s some pics of the truck when I bought it a few years ago. Yes that’s black bedliner, yes I absolutely hate it, and yes it’s a giant PITA to remove.

P.S. still trying to figure out the pictures, sorry if there huge lol
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That dash is awesome. Great project indeed
 
Hello everyone, some of you might remember me from Jeepforum and my Wingnut Build, I kind of stopped updating it after a while and lost interest in that forum. Trying to get back into the swing of things and figured this might help keep me a little motivated to get my projects done. It’s good to be back.

I never stopped working on the Jeep though, in fact I bought a second one. A 1979 J10 that was running when I hauled it home, the plan being to drive it around while I worked on the TJ, though things never seem to go according to plan. I drove it around for a little bit, getting to know the good and bad of my biggest purchase ever. Originally I replaced the main and rod bearings, the oil pump, fixed all the leaky gaskets, rebuilt the carb and with the help of my grandpa got everything running really well, nice quiet idle, very smooth even if it only had 80hp.

Then I learned what blow by is, and why I should’ve investigated that before fixing everything else. After sealing up all of the engines oil leaks, it began to come up and out of the dipstick tube, after riggin up a hose to a catch can from the junk yard, I was able to drive about 15 miles or so before needing to stop and dump 2 quarts of oil from the catch can back into the motor, not a very long term solution.

So I scrapped that plan, bought a gen 3 4.8 LS, 2wd 4l60e, harness and all the necessary swap parts off of craigslist with about 180k miles. New plan, rebuild the motor and swap everything into the truck. Blew the motor apart down to the bare block, bagged and tagged everything, and began to realize the motor needed a decent amount of machine work, and that I wasn’t going to convince myself to put it back together without a fair amount of new parts and machine work. I still have my spreadsheet of parts for a bored out 5.1, totalling a couple grand in parts, tucked away here on my laptop.

New plan, found another 4.8 on CL, 90k miles, pulled from a running chevelle in favor or a new 6.0. Drove 5 hours down and hauled it back home in the back of the TJ for just $500. It is currently sitting in the truck with a 2wd 4l60e that may or may not work. Got it mounted with some Advanced Adapter Motor mounts for a CJ I think, they were for a frame width an inch narrower than mine, stacked some plates on the inside of my frame rails and milled out the slots at work a bit to get my some extra width.

That was about a year ago, I’ve made some progress on the fuel system, wiring harness, exhaust and some other parts of the swap since then, I’ll detail those in future posts. It’s a long project, but I’m finally setup to start working on it again here shortly, for now here’s some pics of the truck when I bought it a few years ago. Yes that’s black bedliner, yes I absolutely hate it, and yes it’s a giant PITA to remove.

P.S. still trying to figure out the pictures, sorry if there huge lol
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So awesome I love these trucks!
 
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I can’t wait to see what you do with it. There’s 2 jeeps that sealed the deal for me when I was a kid. The yellow J10 from Twister and the YJs in Jurassic park.
 
I can’t wait to see what you do with it. There’s 2 jeeps that sealed the deal for me when I was a kid. The yellow J10 from Twister and the YJs in Jurassic park.
Thanks, me either, it's already taken way too long to get to this point. Biggest cosmetic change up first is going to be stripping all the damn bed liner off lol. At least they did a really shitty job of applying it
 
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Well I'm pretty bad at updates I guess, never feels like I have enough time to do everything.

The truck is coming along slowly but surely. I think I have the harness finished up, just need to wrap it in some temporary loom to test fit it in the truck. I ordered a universal LS Swap radiator from Speedway to use in the truck. Was kind of pissed because factory replacement brass and copper radiators were available six months ago for $250 and I was going to use that, but I waited too long and now they're out of stock everywhere.

Anyways, the speedway radiator didn't fit. Didn't realize it until the other day, but the radiator location in the factory core support is shifted driver's side about 2" from center, so the lower outlet was hitting my fan. Don't have pics yet, but I cut the outlet off and rotated it 180* and welded it back on and it clears now with plenty of room. Working on making mounts for it, the factory setup had a flange on each side of the core where it bolts up the core support, so I'm welding some plate on to the sides of the tanks of the new radiator and then welding some flanges on to those.

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As far as TJ stuff goes, I've been working through some ideas in my head, but in the meantime my 2.5's in the back were looking pretty rough. I bought these used and rusty, I wire wheeled all the zinc off originally, clear coated the bodies and tried polishing the resis, and none of that worked lol.

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Not sure if I've mentioned it, but my rear tires rub the shit out of the shock bodies. They start rubbing after about the first 3" of my 8" of uptravel on one side, combine that with just a front anti rock on the loosest setting and no rear sway bar and my tires are rubbing on every turn I take lol. Doesn't hurt the shocks at all though, the 2.5's are big enough I'm not worried about denting the body or anything.

These things needed some TLC, and my sandblaster has been awesome with the new two stage compressor, so in they went. I found some media in town that is some green garnet locally sourced from a quarry in Oregon, like $10 per 100lb and it kicks ass, my favorite stuff so far. I used a medium grit on the resis and unthreaded portion of the bodies, but had to use the fine grit to get into the threads really well. Sacrificed some worn out top caps and resi ends to plug them while blasting.

I've heard really good things about Steel-It and how durable and abrasion resistant it is, so I decided to give this a shot first. Spendy at about $20 a can, but still cheaper and easier than trying to get these zinc coated again locally. Although after all my research and buying three cans, somehow I missed that it says to only apply to surfaces that stay under 200*F, my shocks probably get hotter than that at times, but hopefully they've got some safety factor built into that number lol

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It sprays on nice and thick, I was a bit worried about how rough the blasting left the shocks, but it smoothed out very nicely while drying. It only comes in Gray or Black, I opted for black, but it almost has a hint of charcoal or something in it which I really like. They came out straight up sexy. I've got new hardware on the way to rebuild them, all of my eyes and caps were worn out, so the new stuff will be all black anodized to match, and I'll be reusing the original blue hoses that cleaned up really nicely, should look sweet and fingers crossed the steel it is tougher than the tires.

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I've been working on one of my lathes for a few months now. This lathe is a Rivett 918 Turret lathe, very similar and a competitor to the popular Hardinge DSM59 and variants. It's a completely manual machine with a six position lever action automatic indexing turret, and a two way lever actuated cross slide. These are pretty incredible machines, predecessors to CNC equipment, but still very useful today. All of the turret and cross slide tools have built in adjustable stops, so once you get the first part setup correctly, it's just muscle memory after that and you can produce hundreds of parts in a day.

Originally I bought this entire lathe really cheap, $400, but it was cheap because the kid I bought it from had disassembled the turret with the intent of fixing a broken piece. He neglected to take any pictures or notes, and manuals do not exist for these anymore and there is zero info online to help with reassembly. These are all of the parts that fit inside the turret, lucky me...

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After staring at if for a few months, making some new replacement parts and a lot of head scratching I finally had it together. Some of the engineering in this assembly is pretty damn cool and it was a fun puzzle. I had it together and somewhat working, just needed to tweak one part...

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That led to me binding up a woodruff key, hitting it a bit too hard with a hammer and cracking the casting, then busting out an angle grinder to cut all my freshly made parts in half...

Luckily the crack in the casting wasn't too bad, I stoned down the high spots and am just ignoring it now. After a few more new parts and a slight modification to Rivett's orignal design, or some Billy Bob before me, who knows what its really supposed to look like, but I do know that it works now

 
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Made some more progress on the truck. Ended up using just a cheap Universal LS swap radiator from Speedway. It fits my grill pretty well, but what I didn't realize before buying it was that the radiator location in my truck grill isn't centered, it's about 2" off center towards the drivers side. The lower hose outlet was originally angled in towards the center of the truck, so I had to cut that off and have a buddy tig weld it back on rotated 180* to clear my fan.
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Also had to come up with some way to mount the radiator. Factory setup is a downflow radiator with mounts on the sides of the core to bolt to the core support. Figured I would just copy that, the grill on the truck actually bolts to the frame on each corner via two body mounts, so I'm hoping there's not gonna be a whole lot of flex to break my radiator.

Sometime's I surprise myself with my stupidity. Spent two days making these brackets and welding them to a brand new radiator and not once did the thought cross my mind that if this radiator cracks in the future I would have to remake these brackets all over again and repeat the whole process... So too late now, hope it lasts a while at least.

I used some 1/8" 5052, two long flat strips that I welded to the side of each tank. I then bent up some 90* brackets and welded those to the strips, the idea being to spread out the load on the tanks and hopefully if something does crack or tear, it will be the bracket tearing from the strip vs tearing off the tank and putting a hole in it. Thought they came out pretty slick, tried to weld them on close to the factory angle to put the radiator closer to parallel with the fan and buy myself a bit of room.

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Had some really soft, high temperature rubber laying around. Cut a few 1" squares and put a hole in them to use as bushings between the radiator and the core support. Wondering if I should double up these bushings or not, and also thinking about making some custom threaded studs with a flange that would thread in the back of the J nut and bottom out, then just use a lock nut on the front side so I wouldn't have to worry about it backing off and coming loose and also wouldn't have to preload the bushings as much

If anyone sees any fatal flaws in this design, let me know

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