Project CJ

In August 1997, I bought this 78 CJ5 that has obviously been abused at some point in its life. There were many things wrong with it that were not apparent when I bought it, but the upgrades that I eventually wanted to do anyway will fix most of them. I just have to do them in a different order than I planned (and sooner...)

When I got her home, I opened the differentials to see what gears were installed. The first thing I found were rear pinion bearings that were totally destroyed. This was unexpected since the previous owner gave me a receipt from one month earlier showing that the rear R&P had been replaced. Well, whoever did it screwed up, because they are shot now. Up front, things were even worse. The differential had not been opened in a long time. The oil was the consistancy of Silly Putty and had big chunks of metal in it... Yup. The ring gear was in pretty bad shape.

OK. So I need to do new gears now. No biggie. I wanted to go to 4.56 anyway. I made an appointment with Leonard's 4x4 service in Hillsboro, Oregon. He took about 5 minutes to find a bunch more wrong with it. The worst thing he found was that the front axle was bent and that it had the wrong carrier for the gears that were in it. He also showed me where the floorboards were badly rusted. My first reaction was to sell this thing fast and start over.

Well, Jeeps are a funny thing. You get attached to them. While I had been waiting for Leonard to have time to work with me, I had fixed a lot of minor things on her. While I was doing this, was driving it around a bit and was quite smitten. Even my wife was getting attached. She (the Jeep) even earned a name. With the carb in really bad shape, she backfired a lot and she sounded and drove a lot like the old John Deere tractor (Poppin' Johnny) that we used to have. Hence the name "Popper". How can you get rid of a Jeep once it has a name? It is one of the family now!

Well I guess I get to start fixing things and upgrading as I go.