'82 Jeep Scrambler Daily Driver

Sounds like a good enough reason to do the 5.8 swap. :smokin: Either that, or you're super tired of it and need to pass it along. I'll be more than happy to take it off your hands. 😉 All joking aside, this thing is hot. I dig it. Been a while since I've seen a few Jeep threads with constant updates, but there's three here. Maybe one of these years, I'll be using this one as inspiration too, since you've done several things on my wish list - the hydroboost, twin stick, oh and the biggie of a running/driving Jeep. That's kind of a big one.
 
orange150 said:
Driving home from work today and had some errands to run in a part of town with a lot of stop lights. About halfway home it started idling like crap.

I’m thinking I either have a vacuum leak or fuel boiling, but I doubt it’s a fuel issue.

After dinner I cranked it up and it was still idling bad, I turned one of the idle screws out and the idle got better, so I’m thinking vacuum. I’m going to dig in more tomorrow morning. Uugghh
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No chance its related to the timing you said you adjusted? Dizzy hold down bolt loose?
 
StretchASU said:
No chance its related to the timing you said you adjusted? Dizzy hold down bolt loose?
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Thought about that and messed with it this morning. It was tight down but I fiddled with the timing again anyway.

I did the ol spray around the carb with starting fluid to check for any vacuum leaks and didn’t find any. I also sprayed around the intake where it mounts to the head. Nothing
Checked the vacuum lines going to the distributor and and the pcv line, all good.
Removed and blew through the fuel filter and it was good.
I checked my idle screws, they were both at 2.5 turns. I turned them out to 3.25 and it’s idling better.

I took the top off the 2150 and ran it to see if I could see anything. All looked good.

I’m just not sure why it all of a sudden wants more fuel at idle. To me that sounds like a vacuum leak. But I can’t find anything.
 
Scooter402 said:
Sounds like a good enough reason to do the 5.8 swap. :smokin: Either that, or you're super tired of it and need to pass it along. I'll be more than happy to take it off your hands. 😉 All joking aside, this thing is hot. I dig it. Been a while since I've seen a few Jeep threads with constant updates, but there's three here. Maybe one of these years, I'll be using this one as inspiration too, since you've done several things on my wish list - the hydroboost, twin stick, oh and the biggie of a running/driving Jeep. That's kind of a big one.
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The sad thing is I had a fleeting notion to sell it to fund a gladiator or bronco. Buuuut I don’t want a car payment. And the Scrambler is awesome :laughing:
 
orange150 said:
The sad thing is I had a fleeting notion to sell it to fund a gladiator or bronco. Buuuut I don’t want a car payment. And the Scrambler is awesome :laughing:
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Quoted for truth on both accounts! I've eyeballed both the Gladiator and the Bronco.....sure do look like fun. But just like you said - I really don't mind not having a car payment. :laughing:
 
Well, drove it into downtown for lunch, 6 miles round trip. It seemed to run great. I don't know why all of a sudden I needed to mess with the idle mixture screws and idle speed screw but it's running just a decent as normal.
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orange150 said:
Well, drove it into downtown for lunch, 6 miles round trip. It seemed to run great. I don't know why all of a sudden I needed to mess with the idle mixture screws and idle speed screw but it's running just a decent as normal.
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Ethanol fuel
 
orange150 said:
Could that make that much of an affect? This is the first tank of gas I've put in it since we moved up here. In Raleigh the nearest gas station to me carried ethanol free so I always used that. Up here, not so much.
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Did it to my most consistent and reliable chainsaw. 1 tank that was only a couple weeks old.
 
Yeah that makes a lot of sense if you were running noneth before.
 
After completing the TBI swap on my 304 and getting the tuning within 95% good (11-12 years ago), had the bright idea to treat the old girl to a fill-up of 93octane, figuring if it ran good on 87, more is better, right?... RAN_LIKE_TOTAL_ASS!
Took several more tuning jaunts to get enough headspace to start diluting it back down to 87... and it slowly began running fine again afterwards.

Had forgotten that oopsie until recently when I started using 90 octane No-eth from the store down the road. OTOH, the 304 (after 19 years of beatings) is super sick and ready to relinquish the bay to something larger
 
Just had my first true "CJ specific" hardship from dailying this thing.

Yesterday I tried to beat a good ol summer rain storm home from work. I, of course, didn't make it and the storm turned into probably the third worst storm I've ever driven through. It rained so hard it overwhelmed the air box drain and rain water started pouring in on my feet. And of course my windshield started fogging up and I couldn't get it to defog.

A side note on the storm; a tree fell on a power line right next to me while I was on my way home and exploded a transformer.. never been that close to a transformer popping before. We (and most of fairfax county) lost power unitl about 3am last night. My office still doesn't have power.
 
orange150 said:
Just had my first true "CJ specific" hardship from dailying this thing.

Yesterday I tried to beat a good ol summer rain storm home from work. I, of course, didn't make it and the storm turned into probably the third worst storm I've ever driven through. It rained so hard it overwhelmed the air box drain and rain water started pouring in on my feet. And of course my windshield started fogging up and I couldn't get it to defog.
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I gots 2 words for ya... *SHOWER SQUEEGEE*
 
Been excited to convert my hubs to the older, stronger, six bolt style since I had the parts all fall in my lap.
Got the old Warn hubs and everything cleaned up, went to put my rotors on the six bolt hubs and found out that the conversion doesn’t work with drum brake hub assemblies 🤦‍♂️
Shelved until I buy new hubs from quadratec.

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Man, I have gone down an AMC V8 rabbit hole that I did not intend to go down.

Over the summer @AdamH posted a 360 for sale. My simple brain, thinking I could "easily" swap that in instead of doing a bunch of conversions to make the 351w work, promptly sold the 351 and (after a long wait, thanks for being so patient!) cannonballed from Fairfax to Charlotte and back in a day to pick it up.
All fine and dandy until I started getting parts together when a local guy up here (goes by JimsChopShop on instagram and other forums) pointed out that my engine is an early 360 and finding parts that work might be hard. So far, I've gathered that my engine is a 72 - 73 model year, and I think any "ordinary" 360 flywheel will work, but I might need to find an early 360 water pump to make everything else work. Or, I think I can swap in a later crank and make "normal" 360 parts work.

I refuse to say I should have stuck with the Ford......

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Something about these old AMCs really brings people together. I've had more people send me PMs to help me out than with anything else I've done in the past.
What I've learned is that I can swap any late 360 flywheel and harmonic balancer (four bolt) on it to convert the engine to the "normal" '74 - '92 model year 360 accessories. I just have to get the engine balanced, which it sounds like is almost standard practice with these things anyway.

I now also have a line on a complete '77 360 that I can pull all the accessories, timing cover, water pump, pullies, harmonic balancer, and flywheel off of. So hopefully back on track.
 
orange150 said:
Man, I have gone down an AMC V8 rabbit hole that I did not intend to go down.

All fine and dandy until I started getting parts together when a local guy up here (goes by JimsChopShop on instagram and other forums) pointed out that my engine is an early 360 and finding parts that work might be hard. So far, I've gathered that my engine is a 72 - 73 model year, and I think any "ordinary" 360 flywheel will work, but I might need to find an early 360 water pump to make everything else work. Or, I think I can swap in a later crank and make "normal" 360 parts work.

I refuse to say I should have stuck with the Ford......
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Not a bad rabbit hole to go down!

James (JimsChopShop) is pretty knowledgable, but he ain't no @amcjeepman :D
 
Started tearing into the 360. I'd really like to have this in the Jeep in 2023. My plan, until proven otherwise, is to do this as economically as possible while also throwing a cam and Edelbrock ProFlo 4 at it. I could shelve the EFI if I'm pushing my budget, but I'm really hoping it doesn't come to that. In all honesty I was really hoping to only do top end work, but I figure I'd be shooting myself in the foot if I didn't check bearings and what not while it's on the stand. That being said I do know that I have to go to the machine shop to get the rotating assembly balanced, so I'm debating how far down the machine work rabbit hole I want to go.

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Apparently I suck at taking pictures of cylinder walls.

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Called a machine shop yesterday, the one I want to use doesn’t have any availability until March.
I’m getting cold feet and thinking about having them assemble the entire short block… I really don’t want to burn a bunch of money because my dumbass didn’t measure a caliper correctly or something like that.
 
Didn't realize I haven't updated this thread. I dropped the engine off at a machine shop on January 17th. He said it would be about a month before he would be able to get to my engine, at which point he will start measuring and let me know if the block is good, once I get that call then I will start ordering parts. I'm going to have them turn around a long block plus installing and degreeing the cam, and go through the heads.

In the meantime I've been doing my "last hoorah" items on my drive train, basically wrapping a bunch of loose ends up.

But first, I had to deal with how poorly the Jeep was running. I had checked timing, vacuum, fuel pump, all that and was pretty sure my 8 year old ebay carburetor was the culprit. I couldn't tune out a stumble around 2k RPM, but the real issue was that it would randomly go lean and wouldn't want to run. I'm assuming something is stuck in the idle circuit because I could idle it up past 1k and my AFR would balance back out.
For $60 and some time I could rebuild it, or for $80 I could take a gamble on a chinese amazon carb. So that's what I did.

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At first blush (and two weeks of daily driving), I'm very impressed with the carb. I just had to swap over my throttle linkage parts, and adjust low and high speed idle and it cranked right up, idled, and drove better than it has in a few years.
Now that I've put some miles on it I've been fiddling with the choke as it's really rich at startup, but fine tuning should be expected.
 
Next on the list was to get rid of this damn drip from the rear end. I have never been able to get this Barnes diff cover to seal. I'm sure it's because I didn't use enough RTV, but I tried RTV twice and a Lube Locker and it still dripped, plus it was really close to my gas tank.
Thankfully I'm a pack rat and still had the OE diff cover sitting around. I cleaned it up and bought a Rugged Ridge diff guard to keep things protected.

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Up front, I was going to take it to my preferred shop up here to check my alignment and all that, but I figured for the price of an alignment I could buy a set of those alignment plates and just do it myself.
I picked up a set of BleepinJeep plates from amazon for $80(?). I had to set each plate at 20 degrees to clear the leaf springs in the front and the driveshaft on the back. I also used some bolts, washers, and nuts to secure each tape measure on the dead side of the plate.
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My baseline measurement showed me at 1/2" toed out, which was surprising. I fiddled with it until I got to the prescribed 1/16 toed in.. but now that I'm looking at it I wonder if I should have accounted for the 20 degree angle and gone for more 🤔
 
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