Thursday, March 30, 2006



After we rolled the chassis back into "headquarters" (damn I gotta get rid of that sign) out came the 400 turbo and quadra trac. These will be rebuilt and reused, we are firm believers in this set-up. Have it in my J10 with over 200,000 trouble free miles. Reliability is great, you can still get parts and the full time traction is outstanding. Did I mention a 401 is going in this? oh yeh, that's the title of this blog. It was originally a 304 jeep but a previous owner installed a 401 and the "Jeep Shop from Chester Springs" pulled the engine for a customer and sold us the rest for $500.00. I already had a rebuildable 401 core so wasn't worried. In the meantime we stumbled across a 7,000 mile rebuilt one. More on that later. We yanked the rears and leafsprings and was left with a bare frame. Found a couple of rust throughs, but all in the boxing sections, not in the major frame areas. This Jeep came out of Florida so it lead a better life than here in the northeast. We are also going to experiment with the 400 turbo by installing "switch pitch". This was used by G.M. from 1965 to 1967. What it is, is a variable stator torque converter which gives you hi stall, low stall in one unit. In other words hi performance and fuel economy at the flick of a switch. You can also split shift it as you manually run up through the gears. I have a couple of these transmissions laying around so I'll keep you updated. A shackle reversal up front along with YJ springs are also slated for this project. Want to go with wide track (56") axles. The front is no problem but the AMC 20 offset differential rear was never made in wide track version, because wide track wasn't available until they stopped using quadra trac after 1979. I am not crazy about using spacers with 2 piece axles, so we'll see.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think it's awesome that you and Jeffrey are "specially constructing" this Jeep, and even awesomer that I can read about the process online. Keep it comin'!

7:21 AM  

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