It Begins
We spend the majority of Saturday getting the engine installed into the Jeep. The morning was spent getting the engine prepped as best as we could so that we didn’t have to maneuver around the engine bay. We, last minute, decided to paint the timing chain cover so we’ll see how well that paint sticks. Everything else I cleaned thoroughly before painting but this was last minute.
After a little work we had the engine mounted and starting to go into the Jeep:
Overall it went in pretty smoothly. We had just the exhaust end at the first section from the exhaust manifold and that actually worked out pretty smoothly. The exhaust is actually in pretty good shape so I probably wont’ do anything with it for a while. Here’s a pic of the engine in its final resting place:
Still have some more work to do (hopefully tonight) but it’s getting pretty close. I have a brand new radiator and all the cooling lines are pretty new.
The 4×4 Conversion
Sunday I spent the morning and half the afternoon at Wrench-n-go where I was able to find a shift linkage and the front drive shaft (and some misc bolts I was missing). The shift linkage is from an NP231 but a quick google out at the JY said that would work on my NP242 – so we shall see.
Getting the 4 screws out of the shifter part was a giant pain in the ass. The rivet-like piece they screw into just spun with the screw so we had to break them out. Luckily it doesn’t look like the bracket itself was damaged so I should be good.
The other pain was the driveshaft. One of the screws stripped out completely so I’ll have to find a new bracket because I wasn’t able to remove it. But – it appears to be in pretty good shape so I’m hoping it’s a good DS and I can just throw in some u-joints and be good.
