After a few year exchanging busted knuckles and grease under the fingernails for sawdust and slivers, it’s time to resto a new ride — a 1980 Jeep CJ-7 with the V8 heart of a 1977 Jeep CJ-5.
Even though it’s my 7th CJ build, this one feels a little strange. On the fun side, while I’ve freshened engines and done a few swaps, this is the first one I’m building from the block up — so, hold your breath. On the weird side, I thought I was done with the brand. I switched to building Landies when Daimler took the reigns of the company. Nonetheless, after aging a couple of years in the barn, this project is finally underway.
It’s December on the farm. You’d think with two giant barns, I’d have a place to work in the winter, but I don’t. They’re decent enough to hord junk, but way too sketchy to build anything nice there — so, I’ve had to be resourceful.
How I start a build. Some day I will follow the Frieberger mantra and “get ’em running, don’t get ’em perfect.” But, that’s not my way. My projects start with disassembly, tagging and bagging and piling the grubby, rusty bits into loosely organized piles. Those piles are in the barn.
The next step is resurrecting parts from the grimy part piles and creating sparkling piles of ready to install gear. For this project, I’m starting with the engine. Last year, I sent the block, heads and crank to the machine shop and now they’re in a holding pattern on the front porch.
I’m building probably the most undesirable AMC V8 — the 304. As you may know, the AMC 304, 360 and 401 all share the same block and many of the same part. I swapped a 360 into my last CJ-8 Scrambler build. But, my very first Scrambler had a 304 — so, I have a soft spot for them. Anyhow, the donor engine only had 56K miles on it and probably didn’t need a rebuild. But … I’m doing it anyhow. So, as always, there are many things you can judge me on, if you’d like.
I took on cleaning and inspecting everything else by hand. Today, the clean pile includes the pistons, rockers, push rods, bolts and a few boxes of new stuff — rings, rod bearings and main bearings. So, I’m ready to install the crank and pistons when things warm up. And, that’s where this project stands today.