Hank, "Beast", the SJ Build

B1Toad said:

I had a 304 that smoked at startup. I changed the valve seals using compressed air to hold the valves closed on one cyl at a time. It stopped smoking and I drove it for a long time without doing anything else to it. I heard you can also pack rope in the cylinder.

I always wanted one of those woody Wagoneers. I ended up with a Cherokee of that same size though, I sort of made it into a Cherokee Chief by adding fender flares and a V-8. It was a rarity as the Chief had the 360 but I put the 304 in mine after I fixed the valve seals. Had a manual 3 speed on the floor and manual hubs.

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I've been thinking for a few days now that this might be a good chance to try the compressed air thing.

So the white one turned out to be a bit more work than I thought I was biting off. More dents and rust spots than showed up in the photos (dents are hard to see on an aged white paint job since you can't really see reflections), and I was overly optimistic concerning the engine. It sure doesn't look original (it has what looks like fairly fresh black paint and chrome valve covers) but it smokes like a 37 year old V8 with 194k miles, needs complete new exhaust, shocks, is completely missing stuff like the AC compressor, condenser, hoses and fan shroud, and has some stupid aux fuel tank with no cap so it's undoubtedly full of water and has no room for a spare, and just a bunch of generally annoying things that I can deal with but would rather not.

So I'm gonna be doing a few basic things to improve the white one before flipping it, and just won this one on BaT which will be a more long term keeper and any work required is less urgent. It cost a couple grand more than the white one but will easily save me at LEAST that much work, having already had an engine rebuild, only 132k miles, cold AC, and what appears to be a straighter body. The biggest thing I think I'll have to deal with on this one is a headliner and a base-ball sized dent behind the left corner of the rear bumper and a couple dings that should be PDR material so they won't be a paint job emergency. She likes this color better, anyway.

Lol these are a tale of two SJs.

The blue one is a lot more solid in every way mechanically and body wise, but it sat with a sunroof leak and presumably clogged sunroof drains so it got really humid inside, ruining the headliner and causing surface rust on a lot of the metal surfaces and left the upholstery smelling mildewy.

It'll be a real nice one once I address the issues, and they're things that are more along the lines of what I'm used to dealing with.

Other issues:
Heater fan works, AC doesn't (yes it has two blower motors )

Door locks don't work (4 dead actuators may not be any less likely than 2 bad switches, who knows).

Radio doesn't come on.

Instrument panel doesn't light up.

First move is to go through fuses and see if one or more is blown that will restore operation to some of these. Then I'll go after clearing the sunroof drains and getting it to open so I can try to replace the seals. Wife wants to get the headliner in but gotta take care of the sunroof first or we'll be doing the headliner again.

Today was spent mostly making space in the garage. It's got a bunch of half finished projects going on.

I found an online resource for the FSM (which is 2000 pages because it's ALL Jeep models for that year) and the parts manual, which at least helps tell me what's missing though it's useless for actually buying parts because they're all discontinued.

The white one is gonna sit until the blue one is daily-able, and then I'm gonna do valve seals and exhaust. Might have to rob some parts off of it, but I'm gonna try not to.

Stripped the interior. The back is already mostly taken care of, but I guess somebody was too lazy to pull the seats so the floorpans are pretty rough. I'll hit these spots with a wire wheel and see which ones are solid and which ones aren't....though I know at least one of them isn't.









More than I hoped but not completely unexpected. If nothing else it gives me an excuse to drop the coin on the welder I've been eyeing, because my harbor freight flux welder just burns through this stuff.

The "factory" sunroof is defunct. It's undoubtedly the source of all this corrosion and someone has tried to address it by caulking around it, but I don't know if they were unsuccessful, or they were successful but waited to do it until the damage was done. I need somebody to talk me out of yanking it and welding a patch into the roof.

In other news, it got a name. She felt like the dark blue was more masculine so apparently it's male, and being old with wood panels she liked a more traditional name and though she wasn't wild about how I came up with it, she went with "Hank".

I thought of it because it's blue and seemed kinda beastly, which made me think of the X-Men character Henry "Hank" McCoy, known as Beast. Because I'm an unrepentant nerd.