PoliceMonkey161
New member
Hello Everyone!
I've been busy with my restoration project of what started life as a 1986 CJ7 Laredo. I figured I'd take a few minutes and upload some photos. It's hard to tell by the starting photos but the two owners before me loved this Jeep. 27 years of use, storage and for the past few years use as a farm truck just started to catch up with it. Once I started tearing it down, it was obvious that the other guys did what they could to preserve the Jeep. This was originally going to be a graduation gift for my 18 year old, but he prefers my old Chevy pickup.....Go figure? So I was going to just do some repairs,re-paint, etc so he could use it, but after finding that a CJ7 is not his style, I decided to do a frame off resto/mod to it. Most of the original Laredo equipment had been replaced or upgraded (not sure if that the right term?) by the PO's. I will restore it to something between a base CJ and a Laredo. Would you believe that this Jeep had the OEM hardtop still on it and it had never been removed?It's true!
Since I knew it would be stored outside for the winter, I did a quick paint job on the tub and lined the inside with bedliner.
I started with rebuilding a 258 for it, the original ran fine but had ~ 120,000 miles on it. I did not go with a crate engine, I choose to rebuild this one the way I wanted. It's .040 over with a Crane cam, HEI and I fully ported the heads. The remaining long block parts are stock equivalents.It will eventually have a Clifford intake, Borla headers and a Weber 38/38.
In the last photo you can see the AMC designed oil bypass inside the oil filter galley. It was a real challenge tracking those parts down! When Chrysler bought out AMC, the 87 (87-90?) Wrangler had a 258 but they did away with the built in bypass and used an integrated filter. The person I bought this block from must have figured it was optional???? He did not re-install it during the previous rebuild. The crank was galled and torn up from the oil circulating without going through the filter. My hats off to Moses Ludel, in his book (Jeep Rebuilds Manual, I think?) he outlined the important of this bypass.
I've been busy with my restoration project of what started life as a 1986 CJ7 Laredo. I figured I'd take a few minutes and upload some photos. It's hard to tell by the starting photos but the two owners before me loved this Jeep. 27 years of use, storage and for the past few years use as a farm truck just started to catch up with it. Once I started tearing it down, it was obvious that the other guys did what they could to preserve the Jeep. This was originally going to be a graduation gift for my 18 year old, but he prefers my old Chevy pickup.....Go figure? So I was going to just do some repairs,re-paint, etc so he could use it, but after finding that a CJ7 is not his style, I decided to do a frame off resto/mod to it. Most of the original Laredo equipment had been replaced or upgraded (not sure if that the right term?) by the PO's. I will restore it to something between a base CJ and a Laredo. Would you believe that this Jeep had the OEM hardtop still on it and it had never been removed?It's true!
Since I knew it would be stored outside for the winter, I did a quick paint job on the tub and lined the inside with bedliner.
I started with rebuilding a 258 for it, the original ran fine but had ~ 120,000 miles on it. I did not go with a crate engine, I choose to rebuild this one the way I wanted. It's .040 over with a Crane cam, HEI and I fully ported the heads. The remaining long block parts are stock equivalents.It will eventually have a Clifford intake, Borla headers and a Weber 38/38.
In the last photo you can see the AMC designed oil bypass inside the oil filter galley. It was a real challenge tracking those parts down! When Chrysler bought out AMC, the 87 (87-90?) Wrangler had a 258 but they did away with the built in bypass and used an integrated filter. The person I bought this block from must have figured it was optional???? He did not re-install it during the previous rebuild. The crank was galled and torn up from the oil circulating without going through the filter. My hats off to Moses Ludel, in his book (Jeep Rebuilds Manual, I think?) he outlined the important of this bypass.
