'82 Jeep Scrambler Daily Driver

[orange150]

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to purchase one of my childhood dream vehicles, a Jeep CJ-8 Scrambler. At the time of purchase it had a 4" lift with 33" tires, which I have dropped to 2.5" lift with 31's.
I had no intention of buying one, but I was involved in a t-bone accident with my dream truck, a 2002 F-250, PSD, crew cab, short bed that totaled it out. I loved that truck. It was THE truck for me and I had absolutely no thoughts of getting rid of it. I still miss that truck badly but most trucks of that vintage are either ragged out or way overpriced now.
I was so content with the truck that I bought another project car ('65 Mustang) to build for road racing at VIR and Road Atlanta and had basically written off building anything for OHV duty.
At the time, I had a company vehicle so not having a 'normal' car was no big deal. But of course, I had an opportunity arise with my dream company that I couldn't pass up, the only catch was no company vehicle.

So, the Jeep stepped up for daily duty.
The theme to this 'build' is to keep the Jeep as close to stock as possible, keeping it to a point where I could easily turn it back into a stock '82 CJ-8 w/ the 258, T5, D300 it came with. It needs to pull daily duty (which it has been doing for over a year now); be able to do light trail rides which means I need to be able to drive it to and (hopefully) from the trails which can be up to 5hrs away (right?), and help me work around the yard.

I ask the vast majority of my technical questions on the CJ forums, and am going to summarize the build here since this is my local forum, and I have been posting on this forum since before it was revamped in '05 but stopped when I thought I was done with OHV vehicles...

 

[orange150]

First order of business was to lower the Jeep to a more daily driver friendly level.

After a lot of research it looked like most people recommended the Old Man Emu YJ 2.5" lift conversion. The difference between a YJ and a CJ are the front springs, YJs are 2.5" while CJs are 2". The conversions consists of nothing more than replacing the front springs hangers with conversion specific hangers and wider front springs pads. I took it a bit further and upgraded the spring pads, both sets of hangers, and the shackles.
Two things most people are back and forth on is the length of the shackles and the type of bushings (OME specific or not). In my opinion, since I converted to YJ suspension I should convert the shackles to YJ length as well.
I also used non OME bushings. There is a slight width difference between the leafs and the bushing size but I'm ok with it.

One more note about my shackles - I bought from a local DIY guy. I'm not happy with the fit and finish of them and will be replacing them with a set from www.crabtreetool.com

 

[orange150]

To fit the new front spring hangers I had to completely loosen up the front bumper and the steering box & mount. I have an HD mount which made it that much more fun.

The passenger's side was easy, I just needed to grind a small amount off my Warn bumper to get the proper fit.

 

[orange150]

The driver's side was a little more fun due to the HD steering box mount.

 

[orange150]

Now that everything is all mocked up, I pulled it off, cleaned the frame, and painted it.

Tightening things up proved to be a little more difficult because of the larger hangers.

 

[orange150]

As soon as I started putting the springs together I noticed that I had one more area I needed to clearance. I would have preferred to have everything apart so that I could have done a cleaner cut, but I wasn't about to pull everything that I had just torqued down back off.

 

[orange150]

One thing about the Currie spring pads is that they require studs to mount shocks or sway bars from. I decided to make my own using grade 8 hardware.

I later learned that the threads can actually gouge out the holes and wallow them out. But for now my home brew studs are staying.

 

[orange150]

The rear is a direct swap.

One thing though is that I bought some upgraded rear hangers. I did not install them though due to a repair the PO did on the passenger's side hanger. One bolt had broken off so they just welded the rear of the hanger on. I'm too much of a wuss to attempt the extraction at the house so I'm going to eventually pay a shop to take care of it for me.

 

[orange150]

Next was to correct the poor steering geometry.

I purchased the reamer and sleeve kit from OK4wd. It came with enough sleeves to do all three TRE's but I decided just to do the drag link. I had read about interference issues with HD tie rods when you flip them and that just sounded like one more thing I didn't want to deal with.

You will also notice in the pictures that I upgraded my sway bar links to longer, quick connect versions.

 

[orange150]

Last was the shocks.

I have ran Bilsteins on every vehicle I've owned and I wasn't really planning on changing that.

I went with 5125s valved 250/70 in the front and 170/60 in the rear. I went with a stiffer valving in the front because I have an 8274 in my shed that I will be running steel cable on.

Edit: it keeps automatically turning that first picture..

 

[orange150]

Coupled that with some 31x10.5 Dynapro A/Ts and my suspension is complete!

In reality it took many months. I drove it on the wore out stock shocks for a LONG time, and it was a few months before I did the drag link flip, but y'all get the idea.

I will say that this thing rides amazing with this set up. I am very pleased with it and believe it is well worth the money.

 

[orange150]

Next up for me was an AX-15 swap prompted by an unforeseen T5 failure.

 

[Blaze]

Good looking CJ8 man! Glad to see another one on the board here.

Can't wait to get mine back together.

 

[orange150]

Thanks! I still need to get up your way!

 

[orange150]

Parts collection: slave and master cylinder, clutch assy and flywheel for a '91+ 4.0, pedal assy. out of a '91+ YJ, D300 to AX15 conversion from AA, and Barnes 4wd skid plate to give me a blank canvas to mount my new trans combo to.

 

[orange150]

I wanted to do the more daunting items first, so I tackled the pedal modifications.. which also lead to dealing with the poor wiring management the PO left me with..

 

[orange150]

Because manual 4cyl. CJs had a hydraulic clutch there is already a cutout for a master cylinder (up to 1990). Because I could only get my hands on a '91+ pedal assembly (which I didn't know I had until later) I had some minor measuring to do.

In the second picture you can see the difference in the early style hydraulic master versus the newer style, based on the newer style master cylinder brace. On the newer master, the bottom ear is longer. So the top mounting hole lined up while the bottom one had to be redone.

 

[orange150]

I didn't get a lot of pictures of replacing the clutch pedals, but it was pretty straight forward.

Pulled the old clutch pedal assembly completely apart, and installed the new one in it's place. One thing to note though is that I didn't measure accurate enough so my holes were just low enough where I couldn't use that brace pictured up above.. Frustrating.

Also notice how much the bell crank had worn away just from driving!

 

[orange150]

The easy part!

I wish I had taken the time to clean and paint the under side while everything was out...

 

[orange150]

Took some time to clean and spray the D300 and AX15; may as well make it nice while I have it accessible!

 

[orange150]

Installing the AA D300-AX15 adapter on the D300. I also ordered a fancy aluminum cover for no better reason than I was drunk at the time...

 

[tlucier]

I always loved Scramblers and would love to own one. Sub'ed to watch your build. Enjoying it so far - really nice job.

 

[orange150]

One thing about this swap is that the transmission mount location is moved backwards from stock. A lot of people just adapt the AX15 to the stock skid plate / trans mount. I wanted to take this opportunity to run a better, flatter, designed skid plate so I went with the Barnes unit.

I also wanted to retain the factory CJ style trans mount / torque arm set up, so I made an adapter that mounts to the AX15 but mimics the CJ geometry.

On test fitting the Barnes skid the mounting locations were off a tad. I matched it up to the stock unit and made the corrections, fits great now!
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Hindsight being what it is I'm not too pleased with this set up. I eventually want to get an independent trans mount made and then run a Barnes skid plate underneath. No fab skills means that I have to farm that out though... One day.

 

[orange150]

I had a time removing the pilot bushing to install the AX15 unit. Using a specialty tool and the grease trick did nothing. I then read a trick about using soggy phone book pages to jam in there (similar to the grease trick), it worked flawlessly! Now my phone books are good for starting the grill AND working on my car!

The last pic is of the AA pilot bushing compared to a pilot bearing provided by my local parts store.

I did soak the pilot bushing in oil over night before I installed it.

 

[orange150]

Test fitting the trans and marking the skid plate to drill for the trans mount. Amazingly enough my blind measurement method of over marking the trans mount worked, but I was a little off.
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In my haste at the time I did not elongate the holes to compensate for my slight mistake in measuring (about 1/16" off to the driver's side). I used a pry bar to scootch the transmission over enough to bolt everything down. This is going to come up later...