gearheadmb
New member
Well the jeep finally came out of the garage under its own power for the first time since september. Its been kind of a neat build. Last fall my cousin came across a 79 cherokee that he wanted to buy for its 360 engine so he could put it in his cj5. I did some research and found that these things have Dana 44s front and rear and a turbo 400 trans with AMC bellhousing so i told him if he could get it cheap enough that I would split the cost with him and take the driveline. We bought it for $100, stripped out the drveline and scrapped the body for $140. We started by stripping down the axle housings and going spring over with 7" spring perches from Ruffstuff. A guy i know from a local jeep club had a set of 4" yj lift shocks that he used for 1 year that i bought for $40 and hooked those in with shock tabs that i got from copperhead fab in texas. They have excellent prices if ever need any of that kind of stuff. Craigslist had a set of 35x12.5x15 Goodyear MT-Rs ( the old style good ones, not the crappy new ones) The transmission went in pretty straight forward with a flex plate from napa.I topped the transmission off with a Hurst Promatic 2 shifter. The tansfercase is a quadratrac unit. these have a bad reputation but nobody ever took care of them.I have 3 cases that i picked up during this project and the chains were shot in all 3. They have both output shafts offset to the rh side that means that all the torque has to go through the chain all the time. The advantage to this design is that the rear output is about 4" lower than it would be on a normal tcase helping ujoint angles immensely. It also moves the rear diff to the rh side making it a little easier to dodge stumps and rocks.We were lucky enough to to have a qtrac cj front driveshaft sitting around and i got a cj5 rear shaft shortened. All thats left now is steering. I am going to make a z-link tomorrow from DOM tubing and then it should be ready for its maiden voyage. So yes, we drove it out of the garage and up that mini articulation ramp with no steering. Here in Ohio we usually get one good snowstorm every year and I can't wait to hit the fields in this thing with the snow flying. Then it will probably sit until next spring for the finishing touches (no heated building) and hopefully I will have some money so I can get some lockers and gears for this thing and maybe soup up the transmission on this thing too. Right now it is using the stock 3.55 gears and I think 4.56s would be about right.
