I just can't believe how time flies! Maybe I just spend a bit to much time in the garage. Buy hey, it keep the Mrs. happy. Anyways, it's been just about a year from my last entry. It's not that I haven't had anything to write about...
Please allow me to give you the quick version of what I've been up to. Feel free to ask for more pictures of anything you see below or if you have any questions about something, let me know as well.
It was just about all we could do to get this Toy buggy in the garage. We had to let the air all the way out of the 44" tires to clear the door. After that I set about building an exo-cage that would meet the needs of the owner. He was going to finish welding it and build in his front and rear quarter panels around the cage to complete the job.
Don't you think the back of this thing could use a BBQer built in to it?
This was one of those projects that someone else started and I got the joys of cleaning up all the messes and making it work. It's a pretty cool truck and the owner had tons of cool ideas that will get added in the future. For this round, I cleaned up the engine wiring, built a fan shroud, built shifter boot covers for all the shifters, battery cut off switch, straps on the fuel cell, tied down the ECU...and the list goes on. Now if I could just find the finished pictures. I'll update if I can figure out where they are hiding on this computer.
Scott has, by far, one of the coolest CJ-8's I have seen. He came to me with a pretty interesting idea. He had a Poison Spyder CJ-7 trail cage that he wanted me to extend to fit his rig. On top of that his plans included two back seats, so everyone needed protection. It took a lot of 12" sections of sleeve tube to extend the cage in the needed areas, but in the end it worked out pretty good. On a side note, I have to say I was not impressed by the PS cage. I wish they would have built it about 3 inches taller. You'd have to be 5'5" to fit in it.
Morgan had a hard time with this 93 YJ. He pulled the 4.0 out of it in favor of a TBI 350. Over the next few years he worked on getting it running without much luck. He then brought it to me. I found a tangled mess of wires sitting in the passenger side foot well that needed some loving. After a fun time of cleaning and organizing the wiring mess, things started to come together. I installed a tach converter box that allowed him to reuse the stock tach. I installed a new check engine light, mounted the ECU, mounted the ALDL connector. I then cleaned up some relays on the firewall and cleaned out all the unneeded wires that were left over from the 4.0. It left my garage sounding pretty mean and after he gets the PROM tuned, it will be even better. This is another one that I seemed to have lost pictures for. I'll keep looking.
Steve and his Jeep are regulars around my place. I went with him to look at this Jeep when he purchased it, and the rest is history. I guess you really to get what you pay for. But for $600 I still think it was a good deal. Not long after he purchased it the engine died. He found a junk yard pull that was the right price and sent it over. Once I got the engine out I found out the bell housing was cracked. It was much worse then the picture shows. He was able to find a whole tranny and we got the bell housing swapped. After that, he was up and running. Steve has a list a mile long of upgrades and stuff to do to this Jeep, so keep an eye out for more updates to it as we work through them.
My uncle brought his super cool '32 Ford pickup down from Idaho for me to do some work on it. It had been sitting in his garage for about ten years. So it was in need of a fresh up. Normally I have a strict "4x4's Only" rule, but I really wanted to work on this one. I have to say test driving this one was the best. I cleaned out the fuel system and all the other fluids and gave it a tune up. It then fired right up. I fixed some sloppy electrical work and installed an automatic electric cooling fan switch with relay so my uncle wouldn't have to worry about turning the fan on and off. Plus the original wiring was burnt pretty bad. It's a wonder the truck didn't burn to the ground. I also put a new oil pan on it as the other one had taken a hit and was leaking. I built in a skid pan for it to keep that from happening again. Also the frame had some cracks that got welded up and now is good to go.
Well that's all I have for now. The near future holds some pretty cool plans. I just purchased an LQ9 for my personal Jeep which will be getting quite the make over. The goal: 100mph in the dirt!
