Havent been on here in forever ...I redid one in 2013-2014 (1947 CJ2A) that was in about the same shape...yours is coming along great...I am in upstate NY (Albany NY) so I know the feeling with all the rust and such...keep on digging for sure...looks awesome from here...

MikeC

Hey folks here's an update...more metal work:
I pulled the hood from my shed and started to clean it up to assess it's condition. And it was pretty bad. The hood

had been caved in a few times, and the center flange was stretched and cracks progagated away from that spot.

see pic 1

Also most of the spot welds holding the two halves together were broken and it just sagged in place. I drilled out the

spot welds and also removed the rear brace so I could completely fix it all up along with new coatings. Earlier i

commented on how this thing had thick red oxide primer and now I'm kind of thinking this was original? I saw no

evidence of prior repairs (filler or dent repair).

see pic 2

Once apart I replaced the stretched flange sections and welded the cracks.

see pic 3

see pic 4

I welded the hood halves back together and noticed the straightened hood now had some huge bulges.

see pic 5

see pic 6

I kept going and welded in the newly coated rear brace. The hinge was almost rusted solid but some sandblasting and

working it back and forth freed it up fine.

see pic 7

Once welded completely I had to tackle the huge oil can issue. I tried using my propane heat method but it was slow

going and I couldn't get all the bulges out. I ended up cutting long slits in the forward part of the hood which

revealed how much stress there was...the slits closed right up, I recut the slits to get the proper weld gap and

welded them back up.

see pic 8

After this the hood was flat although hideously ugly with fine textured "tool marks". The forward part of the seam was

still floppy so I welded it to where the flanges begin (about 3 inches). Not stock but stronger now. I cringe when I

see folks sitting on these hoods...how do they not cave them in? They're so weak...

The welding on the brace curled the hood up a bit at the rear corners so I still need to do some tweaks there, but

overall the hood will cut it. A skim of filler should get rid of my hammer work. This hood was the biggest challenge

and took a ton of hours. Still, my labor is cheaper to me than a new hood!

After that I tackled some of the easy stuff...I drilled a bunch of missing holes for the footman loops, and found the

original panels were excellent for finding the positions for some holes such as the spare tire wood anti-vibe "brace".

I started another thread about how I found holes for the spare tire wood block on both sides of the Jeep, and we came

to the conclusion it's possibly because someone goofed up and used a passenger raw stamping for the driver side. Eh,

who knows, but I ended up using the driver panel clamped to the passenger side to transfer the hole locations....

see pic 9

I cut off the gas tank strap brackets from my old panels and welded them onto the new tub too. I purchased a new OMIX

ADA gas tank and fit that in as well. I am using conveyor belt rubber for body mounts and I can use this same stuff

under the gas tank too.

see pic 10

It's about 1/4" thick and works great. That gap will also allow room for the bolt head for the body mount under the

tank (although I ground it to about half thickness for more space too).

see pic 11

see pic 12

I very carefully measured and remeasured the position for the gas tank filler panel and finally welded that in. There

was enough play between that panel and the body opening to adjust it for best fit around the installed gas tank neck.

see pic 13

I also started to go through all my boxes and pull parts out for sand blasting. It's surprising how good some of these

neglected parts came out....they're ready for more decades of use...

see pic 14

The windshield is the last major job and it's in rough shape.

see pic 15

The biggest problem is the sheet metal at the top...it's rotten from having a hardtop flange overlapping the front,

and it needed replacement. There is a strip that I presume is for a soft-top, and that was also rotten. It popped off

rather easily. I see that these are being reproduced, but Walcks is out of them. Also, some don't come with the

backing piece, although that would be easy enough to fabricate. Anyway, I carefully drilled out the spot welds and

made some cuts to remove the bad section.

see pic 16

see pic 17

continued next entry....

June 4th, 2017
Fun projects lately. I've been assembling the Jeep which is fun because I can see the Jeep as a working complete vehicle rather than a pile of dirty parts. I've never driven this Jeep, and never sat in it either since it was such a revolting mouse habitat. As I indicated in my last post I was thinking of taking the tub off to finish welding it up and perhaps starting the paintwork. But I don't have the budget right now so I'm going to just put the thing together. Probably better to do this now since all systems need to be COMPLETELY redone (fuel, wiring, interior bits, etc, etc)

The first thing for me was to repair the seat frames. These seats still had their spring sets and covers, but the mice claimed most of the jute and carried off alot of the gray vinyl.

see pic 1

I got the driver seat in with no issues and drilled in the floor holes for the legs. I ended up making new "feet" for both seats...these are the rear tabs that sit on the edge of the rear floor. The originals are simply an "L" shape but don't offer good support and I had some cracks. I see from Bob W's book that Willys changed to two strut legs in '52 or '53, so I duplicated that.

see pic 2

The passenger seat did not fit into the new floor/toolbox config. I suspect the OMIX ADA tool box I put in is not the same dimension as the original, so the front mounts sit farther back by about 3/8". So this means the seat won't settle all the way onto the wheelwell tab. You can see here that to settle in against the rear wheelwell the front pins are forward of their intended sockets.

see pic 3

I decided to cut the frame tubes and remove 3/8" of an inch.

see pic 4

I welded them back together and the seat fits perfect now.

see pic 5

I got some conveyor belt rubber and made up all my body mounts, and installed them (minus a few I can't put in until I get the tub off to drill holes).

see pic 6

I also did my final fitup of the gas tank. Since I was there I got some 1/4" brake line and made up my gas line. In order to fit this up, I had to drop the exhaust, remove the brake and clutch pedal set up, and also the front fender. What a domino effect. I got the fuel line all beautiful, got some nice line clips, and some slotted screws, and put in the line (still need the insulator stuff for each clip).

see pic 7

I had hoped to re-do the original flexible fuel line fittings at the pump end, but I could not find rubber fuel line in this size to re-use them, (a sort of compression type fitting set)

see pic 8

Instead, I simply made my own inverted flare fitting with a barbed fitting end for now and I put in a 1/4 rubber fuel line to the pump. When fiddling with that, I surveyed the pump that was on the block and confirmed that I had been running it (during my chassis testing) with a huge leak that pumped gas right into the engine. The engine oil is full of gas. I was avoiding investigating this because these combo gas and vac pumps are pricey. Even the rebuild kits are crazy. After looking into it further, it seems that a fuel pump listed for CJ3B's will work fine, and the 17709.03 OMIX unit is less than 80 bucks, it's just not correct for a 3A. I can't justify a completely correct resto so the reasonably priced 3B pump is fine for now.

When I took out the pedals, I decided to fix the brake pedal slop. I ended up buying bronze bushing stock from McMasterCarr and boring out the pedal in order to bush it with the bronze. A 4" length of this bushing material was 16 bucks.

see pic 9

The bush needed honing after to fit over (the new) pedal cross tube and I used a wheel cylinder hone to get it to size. It worked pretty good.

I also fabricated a clutch cross shaft rod with clevis rod ends to replace the simple double
ended "L" rod.

see pic 10

see next entry...

July 16, 2017

I've made some headway on the re-wiring. With some books on car electrics and some internet research I came up with a fairly simple, modern system that is mostly hidden. Initially I was thinking of keeping it mostly stock, but I had converted to 12V already, and I thought if I did make this Jeep a snow plow rig, having a rugged electrical system would be best. Basically I'm adding fuses to everything, and using relays for the horn, lights, as well as one relay for an accessory only fuse panel for turn signals, and future stuff like a heater blower motor, etc. I did some shopping on Amazon and bought a pack of relays, some fuse blocks, and wire. I had some single row terminal blocks laying around, and I used them for now, but I'll convert to double row when I rip the Jeep apart for paint.

I used an aluminum plate to serve as the fuse "panel" with some feed through holes and locations for my terminal strips.

see pic of panel layout

There's not behind the dash as far as mounting locations, or wire routing space for the matter. So I got creative and made 4 bracket arms to spread out to various locations to mount the panel. I  put it up underneath on the driver side, completely out of view, but easy to get to to inspect fuses or relays. I also made a small steel rod traversing from the middle of the firewall over to the panel to simply zip tie my new harness to and keep it from interfering with the parking brake, gauges and speedometer cable.

see Pic of panel with brackets

see Pic of panel installed.

I got a 7605 IC along with some capacitors, and made up a 5V supply for the gas gauge. The heat sink is simply through a standoff into the panel. The regulator is only for the gas gauge.

see pic of 5V regulator

And, with the inspiration from athawk11, I made up my own battery clamp. I cut strips of some 16 gauge steel and hammered and bent some shapes, drilled some spotweld holes and welded it up. It came out pretty good! And it looks old school. I even made a strap to connect to the passenger fender.

see pic of battery hold down...

I'll update when I get the turn signals and lighting done....

After the fun part, I continued with the install/upgrade by filling my panel with relays for the horn, accessory fuse panel, and the high and low beams. There are two fuse blocks on the panel, one "always hot", and one for accessories.  I used standard (ugly) 14 and 16 gauge pvc jacket wire. I regret not getting a proper pallette of colored jackets with tracers. Better yet would have been braided stuff, but plain wire will do for now.

Next was to figure out how to add turn signals. I ran into the classic problem for these old rigs: how to add turn signals to a vehicle with single filament front parking lamps. The problem is that the 900 series Signal Stats don't allow using the same filament for parking lamp operation and turn signalling. The 800 series Signal Stats WOULD allow "dual function" on the front filaments, but single filament front parking lamp vehicles haven't been made for decades, and the old 800 series Signal Stats aren't made anymore.

One solution is to add dual filament housings to the grille but that generally involves drilling out the grille to fit a larger two filament housing. I didn't want to do this. Investigating the internals of the Signal Stat revealed that the old 800 series contacts and sliders design is still "baked in" to the newer 900 series and could be modified to have dual filament functionality for the front lamps.

The mechanical system in the Signal Stat has 2 sets of 2 sliders and contacts which are moved by the signal arm. The rear sliders have input contacts for both turn signal power (flasher) and brake lamp power, but the front section only has one input for turn signal power. You can see that one whole row of contacts is left out.
To add two inputs, I drilled out the terminal strips over the front lamp sliders and added turned down brass machine screws to fill in the missing contact sockets. The outermost terminal strip had to be cut in order to create a new "input" for the parking lamp. When at rest, the parking lamp input passes on through to each front lamp filament. When the one slider or the other is deployed by the signal arm, the flasher signal is directed to one side or the other.

(To be continued)

Finally, I ran new wiring for the lighting. Here too I used modern PVC jacketed stuff, but most of it is covered by ashpalt loom material I sourced from a local NAPA. I used the loom clamps kindly sent to me by 1955CJ-5 a few months ago. These keep the loom in place as it runs to the back in the frame rail.

The original headlight socket terminals are easily re-usable. Willys used nice quality electrical bits (although the cloth covered wire was mostly missing the cloth!). I even re-used the flag terminal for the headlight bulb ground.

It was time to sandblast and clean all the headlight bucket housings and hardware, and also refurbish my used NACO tail lights. Everything was painted and put back together. The hardware for the headlights was also good quality stuff and cleaned up nice. I made up a piece of heavy steel wire into a hook to get the springs looped over the dished sockets.

The NACO tail lights look great. I'm happy I chanced upon these units with the chrome bezels and glass lenses.

So that's it for now. I'm at a stand at this point: I'm not sure if I should tear the Jeep apart now to prep for paint, or keep going and pull out the Koenig half cab and restore that over the winter. I'll post again soon I hope.
Dave