The Zombie Jeep
Good day rustlovers! Welcome to the farm… er.. the car thing that I write. THE FREE MODEL T! I’ve been gone so long that some of you my have assumed that I bought the farm… Well I did! Patient wife and I have been looking for more privacy, less crowding and more room FOR CARS! We recently stumbled across a spot in East San Diego that’s eight times bigger than our current digs and is fully fenced, has trees and droolworthy garage space.
Has the home hunt stopped me from tinkering on rusty junk? Of corse not! If anything my junk is rustier than ever- um… nevermind, that didn’t sound right… uh, so let’s talk about Jeeps!
One of the reasons I love Jeeps is because no matter how beat up they become, you aren’t judged for driving junk. In fact it’s quite the opposite. If you’re spotted cruising in your unscathed JK on 37’s and faux bead lock wheels with a billet light bar, your mall cruiser will most likely be heavily judged by anyone who has ever actually seen dirt. These proud Jeep posers will in all likelihood espouse the “Jeep Wave” as being for wrangler types only and snub anyone in a beat up XJ. Rant Over.
A typical mall cruiser pictured in the roughest terrain it will ever see.
Once safely off of the trailer at home I dug in. Front airbags changed, front bumper cut off, wheels and tires changed. I figured my bent steel wheels and notched up off road tires were the main cause of the death wobble whenever I tried to drive it on the road and I had a nice set of 17″ alloys with new cooper tires off of my ’02 so I tried to install those. Tried. It would seem that a ’95 Grand Cherokee and an ’02 don’t share the same lug pattern. No problem. The local 4 Wheel Parts actually stocked wheel spacer/adapters that both corrected the bolt pattern AND spaced the wheels out properly. Joy. She was looking good but dirty and had seen some nasty mud and some salt in Baja so I hit the car wash and had her cleaned top to bottom. I popped on the freeway aaaaaaand death wobble.
So shiny…
A few weeks back I threw a fuel pump into my 1973 Jeep DJ-5 and got it running to sell it. When some buyers were on their way I pulled it out onto the street and did a little trip around the neighborhood and knew I couldn’t sell it. Luckily it was running badly. Really badly. It wouldn’t idle, was puffing black smoke and was really loud and shaky. So the perspective buyer walked away and I fixed her up. It wound up having a blown exhaust manifold gasket which it shares with the intake manifold so it was basically sucking exhaust in through a giant vacuum leak. Bad.
I pulled off the manifolds and the situation wasn’t pretty. They bolt together and install as a unit but the mating surfaces were certainly NOT on a flat plane. I knew this when I originally pieced this thing together as the lo-cal customs “cheapo Jeepo” but my goal at the time was to build something to thrash without spending any money so I had just cranked it down. Little did I know that I would daily drive it for years, date may wife in it and eventually roll it onto its side in the desert!
-Compression tested -all good
-Plugs and wires, cap and rotor changed
-Pertronix installed to eliminate the points
-Converted to internally regulated GM 3 wire alternator (more on that)
-Changed leaky oil pressure gauge
-Valve cover gasket and air filter changed
The alternator was a fun and necessary project. The AMC externally regulated alternator would slowly drain the battery and wouldn’t kick in and start working until it had hit about 4000 rpm. I had tried changing it AND the regulator but it was exactly the same AND the alternator tested “bad” on the bench right out of the box. The alternator didn’t bolt right up but you can get a GM clocked however you wish so all the holes and the pulley lined up. All my pulleys are spaced out 1/4′” to accommodate the only balancer I was able to buy and my alternator bracket couldn’t take the extra strain so it had started to bend. I reinforced it.
Finished bracket on the alternator.
3/8 plate steel cut to reinforce the alternator bracket.
Flimsy.
Beefy.
Another pic of the finished product.
