Few more pictures.

Here are a couple more pictures. You can see the engine tranny combo, then a close up of the very dirty clutch housing. The inside of the clutch housing was just as oily and dirty as the outside, which looks like was caused by a leaking valve cover gasket as well as a rear main crank seal.

I must say that with 266K km on the Jeep, the clutch itself looks in great shape, which shows how nice Jen and Michael treated it over the years. The release bearing for the clutch is showing signs of wear, so we plan to replace the clutch, pressure plate and release bearing just because we have them apart. The rad on the other hand was close to disintegrating, :-), likely as a result of years of salt spray. So a new rad is at home in a box.

While we wait for the machine shop to complete the engine work, and supply the rest of the rebuild kit (pistons, rings, bearings, gaskets etc), we will start work on the transmission rebuild today. We obtained a rebuild kit with new bearings, gaskets, and syncros from the US, and are looking forward to seeing the inside of the tranny.

Work continues...

We have been busy disassembling the engine, cleaning parts, and painting parts. The dismantling was fairly straight forward, with many pictures along the way to ensure we had a reference for the re-assembly. Most parts were cleaned on the wire wheel to remove rust, washed in the varsol tank, dried, and painted. It has been a few parts each night, but most of the direct engine ones are done.

Removing the external parts, like the engine mounts, water pump, valve cover are required but not really that exciting for the boys. When we removed the cylinder head, the timing chain and sprockets, then the cam, they started to appreciate what went on in the engine. The big moment was pulling off the oil pan, removing each piston/connecting rod assembly, and finally removing the crankshaft.

You can see in the photos the parts that are all set to go to the machine shop: the engine block, crankshaft, cam shaft (hidden in the red rag), cylinder head, oil pump, rocker arms, lifters and push rods. The machine shop will hot tank most parts (very good cleaning) then measure everything to determine what needs to be machined and what can be reused. The pistons are very worn so the block will need to be bored 0.010" or 0.020" oversized. The crank looks very good so may only need to be polished. The cam is 50/50, but the rockers, lifters, and push rods all look good. The head will be disassembled, 3 angle valve job, new valve seals, and reassembled. Our list of "other" parts is still relatively small which is nice.

Finally the Big project

While doing the smaller projects last year and enjoying the Jeep, it became evident that the syncros in the tranny were in need of replacement. Also a compression check indicated that cylinders 2 & 3 were below minimum and hence implied an engine rebuild would be required. Over the last few months we spent some time planning a complete engine and transmission rebuild project. An excellent learning opportunity for the boys. Well last weekend we finally started it.

I won't go into all the details, but we spent ~9 hours disconnecting everything from the engine and transmission, removing the exhaust system, pulling the driveshafts and removing the transfer case. Then yesterday we pulled the engine/transmission out as a unit, split them apart, mounted the engine on a stand and started to disassemble it. Plenty more things to do and photos to come.........