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1979 CJ5 Build (Tank Killer)

220K views 1K replies 93 participants last post by  boarderofsnow 
#1 ·
Here is the step by step process so far of my 1979 CJ5 Build. It has been quite the long drawn out process. There is no method to my madness and I have learned al ot over the build so far. I still have many different mods coming for my rig.

I feel that we as Jeepers have a lot of knowledge and sometimes that information gets squandered. So I want to give some light to other who are looking to build CJ's with what I have accomplished on my rig.

Believe me this is a budget build and there were many different avenues I could have taken but the money wasn't there at times and I needed to make the best with the funds I had.

Feel free to ask any questions and I will do my best to provide any information I have available. The 4x4 Jeeping community is one of the best experiences I have ever had. I just want to give back to all those who have helped me going forward with my build.

Enjoy
 
#58 ·
After the forward part was in we pulled all of the seats and interior out and welded in the Jeep to help with not needing to measure. Its a wonder why my neighbors didn't kill me while all of this was going on. :)
 

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#59 ·
Next we pulled the cage out to finish the welding. Clean it up. and paint it. Here was the process.
 

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#60 ·
Finally after two days of painting it was time to put here in and bolt her up. I was really suprised at how well this turned out.
 

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#61 ·
The last area was to put in the new seats I had won. I pulled the old ones and painted the frame rails. Clearly when these said CJ the were meant for a CJ7 because I had the hardest time getting these to fit in the rig. The frame rail of the seat hits on the my fender tubs. So I had to cut the seats frame rail a little. Didn't cut to much or jepordize the integrity of the seat frame. I then had to use washers to fill the gap and purchase longer hardware. Eventually we will weld up some new frame rails for the seats.....its a tight fit now and needs to change.

Here are the pictures of painting the old rusty frame rails and putting the seats in.
 

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#63 ·
Thank you. Still more to come! I still need to tie the cage into the frame. I also forgot to post how I tied it into the floor. Here is a pic. The plan is to tie another plate into this under the body and weld that into the frame.
 

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#68 ·
Thanks man! I really appreciate it!
 
#65 ·
I can agree with that. Tube work isn't an easy thing to learn that is why not too many people invest in such an adventure. If we'd do it again we would use a tube bender and frame out everything. Buying kits are good however most kits don't come with instructions and are pieced out like legos. Every junction being week unless you place a good ole gusset or inner sleeve. Said and done...do it yourself...
 
#69 ·
Yeah I agree once the Shops I was taking it to stopped thier price quotes and the end reciept was more than I was expecting it was time to get it done. Most of the things I was looking at doing I needed shop space for or didn't have the tools. Now that we have invested in a welder and a tube bender its just finding shop space to do it in. Living in Maryland and in our neighborhoods there are no driveways or garages. Lately we have been renting shop space from one of the auto hobby shops on Fort Meade. Definately less expensive and you do it yourself.
 
#70 ·
Burns? Hey man thanks! You gonna make it to Ice Breakers? I can't say just yet that the Tank Killer will be ready. I still have to have a slip yoke for my driveshaft made. We will see! Good hearing from you man!
 
#67 ·
Nice work Boarder. I really like the paint you did on the hood and the liner on the interior. The roll bar looks pretty nice too.

I was a crew chief on F-16's and FB-111's in the Air Force. What a great time! I find that I use a lot of the mechanical and troubleshooting skills I learned when I was in. Sure comes in handy with a rig like a CJ, huh?

Go wing nuts!

trailhead:cheers2:
 
#71 ·
Yeah all the maintenance skills I picked up in the AF do help. I figure if I could work on a 10 million dollar acft I can fix this old CJ up. :2thumbsup:
 
#73 ·
Also when we were out on the trail in the past I would notice when I would start to stretch the brake lines would get tight. I had the stock brake lines and with the lift I was running it was time to get longer brake lines. I bought some 6in brake lines that ran me about $90 bucks. It was a good investment and I would suggest it to anyone who is looking at lifting their Jeep. Here are the pics.
 

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#75 ·
Well everything was ready and we headed for another trip to Big Dogs. This was the September Main Jambo in 2010. Enjoy.
 

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#76 ·
This next set of logs I was coming down off of on Yahoo trail. It was a sharp turn so I went to back up and my shifter was in free play. The diagnosis was a broken shift cable. The good thing was some one could climb under and put her in park or in gear manually with my transmission. The badnews was someone had to climb under my rig and do this every time. We limped off the trail and drove around trying to find a replacement cable. No luck so I had to drive it home this way. It wasn't until I got home that I noticed more damage elsewhere.
 

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#77 ·
From the return of that trip I had a busted leaf spring, broken shifter cable, and I had problems with the switches to my electric fan burning out. Evidently you can't run an electric part that is pulling 40amps steady to a 10amp toggle switch :(

It wasn't until this Feb 2011 that I started considering what I wanted to do. I know I will get criticism for going with what I went with but when I try it out on the trail that will be the ultimate way to know how she will handle. Well remember I said I had a pair of full size axles out of a 72 jimmy. I wanted to go with a Corporate 14 in the rear and was thinking about keeping my Dana 44. I decided that the cost of converting the Dana 44 hubs to 8 lug was going to be about the same price as a used Dana 60. So I started hitting craigslist. I found a guy who had what he said was a set of Dana 60's with 4.56's, lockers and about 56,000 miles on the original Chevy CUCV. He wanted $1900 for the pair. We started talking and I started doing my homework. I found that there were few and far between Chevy Dana 60 rears. I found that chances were it was a Dana 60 open up front and a Corporate 14 with a detroit locker and 4.56's.

It came to be true that what I said above was the case. It was still a good buy and should be pretty powerful on the trail with limited breaking points. So I talked the guy down to $1600 and we went and picked them up.

This first picture is my old axles. I sold the 12 bolt but am still looking for someone to take the Dana 44 Chevy front with 3.73 gears. I'll let it go for $250 if anyone is interested.

The next pictures are my Dana 60 and Corp 14.
 

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#78 ·
Time for YJ springs?
Rig looks great man. Are we caught up with you yet?
 
#81 ·
We are getting there but still have some ground to cover. I have been a Jeep maniac these past two months.
 
#80 ·
The next step with those will be to build them. I will stay with the gears and am going to purchase a seal kit for each. I am also doing a disc conversion in the corporate 14 to get better brake response and lose about 40 pounds of weight by kicking those drums to the curb. I am considering putting a aussie locker up front and keeping that detroit in the rear till it breaks.

The next step in this build was to fix my leaf spring and pick up a new shift cable from B&M. Well I wanted to go with YJ lefts up front. I had heard good things about them and looked into doing the conversion myself. I also wanted to go with the BTF Stretch kit in the rear. CJ5's have about an 83in wheel base. I wanted to get as close to a CJ7 wheel base which is about 10in longer than the 5. This stretch kit uses XJ leafs and the leaf is turned to where the center pin is closer to the rear bumper. It give about 7in of stretch. So here is what I bought.

The rear Stretch Kit Bumper from BTF. Cost me about $300.

The next was YJ Springs for the front as green89yj guessed. I did a 1.5in lift on those. I was told that lift would match up with stock XJ leafs. I ordered all new hangers to be welded in. I'll get to why I did that in a second.

Next was the stock XJ leafs for the rear and I went with a lubricating bolt and bushing set up for everything.

I also ordered a tube fender kit from BTF as well. Here are the pics.
 

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#1,157 ·
The next step with those will be to build them. I will stay with the gears and am going to purchase a seal kit for each. I am also doing a disc conversion in the corporate 14 to get better brake response and lose about 40 pounds of weight by kicking those drums to the curb. I am considering putting a aussie locker up front and keeping that detroit in the rear till it breaks.

The next step in this build was to fix my leaf spring and pick up a new shift cable from B&M. Well I wanted to go with YJ lefts up front. I had heard good things about them and looked into doing the conversion myself. I also wanted to go with the BTF Stretch kit in the rear. CJ5's have about an 83in wheel base. I wanted to get as close to a CJ7 wheel base which is about 10in longer than the 5. This stretch kit uses XJ leafs and the leaf is turned to where the center pin is closer to the rear bumper. It give about 7in of stretch. So here is what I bought.

The rear Stretch Kit Bumper from BTF. Cost me about $300.

The next was YJ Springs for the front as green89yj guessed. I did a 1.5in lift on those. I was told that lift would match up with stock XJ leafs. I ordered all new hangers to be welded in. I'll get to why I did that in a second.

Next was the stock XJ leafs for the rear and I went with a lubricating bolt and bushing set up for everything.

I also ordered a tube fender kit from BTF as well. Here are the pics.
Hey bud I am going through the rear stretch right now as well using XJ springs. Do you have any tips / tricks / recommendations? I'm planning on welding hangars to my current rear bumper.
 
#82 ·
I did fix the shifter cable but didn't secure it and it sat on my muffler when I drove it and melted. I have to order another one in the next few weeks and will document that here.
 

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#114 ·
Shifter Cable update. As I had mentioned I had some problems with the shifter cable because of where the shifter was mounted and the cable angle. This cost me two shift cables in the last year. The last shifter cable was my fault for the most part by not securing it properly. So here are the pics below of the fix.

The first picture was cutting the back end of the cable mount (which wasn't my idea, some bad advice I listened to). The idea was to bend the cable down to the proper angle.

The next picture is the shifter with the cable mount bent down on a piece of cut out cardboard. This is a great way to see if what we were doing would clear the inside of the tub. By doing this cut out in cardboard it helps to save time dropping the shifter in and out of the vehicle. Since I was working on a lift this wouldn't be a big deal but if this is something your running into at home in the driveway it will save time and effort.

Well this is where the advice I recieved cost me a few hours with this fix. The shifter cable for the B&M shifter is a hard cable. The guy who gave me the advice didn't take that into consideration. So you can obviously see that the way this cable mount is bent down that it would create another area of binding in the cable which was what I was trying to get away from.

So the fix was to lower the bracket down by cutting up some metal to lower the bracket and welding them together.

The last pic is the cable now clearing the hump where the old transmission used to lay.

This was a headache that should have been done right the first time. In the end it was a injury that I didn't give the proper time to heal and continued to re-injure it. NO FUN!
 

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#83 ·
At this point we were ready to do the spring conversion. I hadn't wanted to swap my drive line yet so we were going to put the XJ leafs in but keep the center pin closer to the driver. That was going to stretch me about an inch but I figured I had that in my slip yoke so I'd be fine.

Here is the day we rolled it in and started on the front. A few of you will remember I said I had a 2in Redneck lift that was welded under the leaf spring mounts when I gained possesion of the Jeep. I have hated this thought process and we were going to take this opportunity to fix it. Here is the example of what I am talking about.
 

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#84 ·
So we used Forte Meade's auto shop and rolled it in. The front was first.

Here is the front with the swaybar and shocks disconnected.

Next was to cut out the 2in block welded in. This was not fun. I would give my life for a plasma cutter over the grinding wheels we used.

The next is the cut frame after the blocks were removed.

The last is saying goodbye to the red neck lift!
 

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#85 ·
Next was welding in the shackle mounts and hangers for the front. I used rear hangers because the rear springs in a CJ are 2 1/2in wide and YJ leafs are 2 1/2in wide where as the front CJ leafs are only 2in wide.

We welded the shackle hanger all the way around so there was really no need for a bolt. On the front rear hanger we could only weld on the outside of the hanger because of my header location from the small block. The fix was to mount the rear hangers with a bolt under the hanger for security.
 

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#86 ·
Next was slapping the YJ leafs up. I made a bad calculation with the u-bolt leaf spring mounting pads. I thought we could just drill holes in the old ones to match the YJ springs. The bracket was just to short.

Luckily I had ordered a full set of brackets for my full size axles and we took a shot at them working. We had to turn the front driver side ways and the passenger side one had to be redrilled in two spots but they are BTF beefy!
 

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#87 ·
Here is the finished product minus the shocks mounted or sway bar mounts welded on. It dropped about an inch in the front all together. Also with the weight of the veihicle the Leafs are pancaked out pretty good so I will have to do an add-a-leaf. I knew that going in but was hoping to not have to.
 

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#90 ·
All so with the front done it was time to get to working on the back. All in all the back took 2 days. We definately hit some snags and had to make some decisions that really modified the tank killer. Here was breaking here down in the rear.

Removing the spring packs and u-bolts way easy after hitting them with PB Blaster.

Then we removed the old custom bumper some one had built way back when.

That left the old bumper mount exposed and it was twisted up pretty good. We decided to cut it off. I will go back and reinforce the body mounts when I get a chance.

Then we cut out the redneck lift blocks. Here is what we had after each of those steps.
 

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#91 ·
Next came welding the bumper on. I didn't mention above but we removed the gas tank for safety with the welding. Just common sense. I took this opportunity to take picture because I am planning on going with a custom gas tank set up in the rear. Most people just slap a gas tank in the back seat but owning a CJ5 means you already have as little room as possible.

So here is the bumper welded up and then pictures for the inside of the rear frame rails and crossmember.
 

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#92 ·
Next was welding up the rear hangers. We knew we would only be able to weld into the outside of the hangers because of my exhaust location and there hangers would be perment (unlike my front hangers when I go to full width axles) so we drilled into the frame and added two bolts to the underside of the hanger.

Then we did a mock application of the leaf spring and noticed the exhaust tips would be in the way. The plan is to reroute the exhaust to where it comes out the side and not out the back.
 

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#93 ·
Here is where we hit the big snag. I ordered CJ rear hangers when I should have ordered XJ rear hangers. If any of you have dealt with XJ hangers you know that one eyelet is far larger than the other. Well since I wasn't planning to stretch it just yet (because of the need to move the gas tank elsewhere) I was just going to keep the XJ Leafs pointed the correct way. Well long story short the eyelet was to big for the hanger. I was burning shop time ($50 bucks a day) so we made the decision to go with the stretch. If any of you have done a stretch in the rear you know what must happen.

Fenders get trimmed and gas tank gets relocated.

So we hopped to it and started mounting the leafs while my buddy got to work on the fenders.

As you can see I used BTF shackles for the rear. They are beefy!
 

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