1952 Willys Overland 4x4 Truck - Part 1, Initial Assessment

thank you Hello everybody welcome and thanks for tuning in all of a sudden I find myself with five projects going on at the same time so I think that's probably a record for me I'm still working on the Ford 4000 I finally got all the parts for the case DC project looking forward to getting back to that one unfortunately I think I lost a cylinder in my 1914 Model T so that has now become a future project as well I also got a replacement set of wheels for my Fordson F tractor and that will be a video of its own hopefully here in the near future but the focus of today's video is going to be on this 1952 Willys Overland pickup it's a very cool rig it's four wheel drive one of the unique things about this project is I don't own the truck this is my cousin's truck they had it trailered out to me across country and I'm really excited to work on it so we'll do a quick walk around on the truck and then we'll Dive Right In [Music] thank you [Music] so the way I like to go about these projects first is to go through the mechanical systems completely and thoroughly see how it works see what doesn't fix what needs to be fixed basically make the thing roadworthy and safe again then we'll start thinking about the Aesthetics and the plan is to keep this mostly original which I'm a big fan of I would hate to see this thing hot rod it out this truck has been painted at least once in the past and it's pretty evident to me what was probably the original color I would call that you like a dark hunter green or some type of dark green but it's evident pretty much all over the truck wherever the white paint is flaking off under the hood on the front grille and in the entire inside of the cab I know it's a little dark in here but you can see that the door jambs and the doors are still green the dash is still green and you can see the firewall as well it's all that same dark green color and if you look under the hood over here all this in here all down there that's all white overspray so whoever painted this in the past didn't give a whole lot of care to uh masking things off at least under the hood and the orange striping that they put on top they didn't mask down here very well either the body panels and fenders all seem to be pretty good with a couple exceptions here and there there are a lot of unique lines and low points and high points and you know bumps like this even the fenders here come to kind of a point right there and then they're raised right there where that stripe is the doors have ribs molded into the the door panel itself on the top and the bottom and then it's also got two inset panel areas right here and then a more narrow one right there we do have some evidence of some Bondo in here it's pretty thick stuff so somebody did not do a very good job of prepping before they put the body filler on because it's rusting through there I always like to start the projects with an initial investigation and assessment I'm here in the engine compartment first because it's not starting I guess it did run uh just a few days ago when they loaded it onto the trailer to bring it out here but when they got it here it's not wanting to start so that's okay I was going to go through all the systems anyway we're going to start here we're going to check spark we're going to check the fuel system you know the fluids and all that and see if we can get it to run see if it's got oil pressure see if it smokes or not maybe even check the engine compression and that will allow me to make a more thorough assessment of what we've got here and what needs to be done besides not firing up there's also another issue when you press the starter sometimes you get this horrendous grinding noise so I'm making the assumption that either some of the teeth on the Bendix are bad or missing or some of the teeth on the flywheel are bad or missing more likely it's the starter that's the problem and before we get started you can see down in there that's the makers tag all right we're going to check for spark on the first cylinder now all right so keep your eyes right there all right good we've got Spark this is the oil fill and it's also the a dipstick and it's quite long as you can see so it's actually got a little bit too much oil in it not enough to cause any issues the other thing is oil seems to be a little bit runny so there might be a little bit of fuel in the oil perhaps from you know choking it a lot when you're trying to start it oil is just a little bit runny but it's not terrible it's definitely good enough to uh get it running on unless we get it running well we can change the oil at that point well I know there's some gas in the system I added about a gallon to the tank myself and then you can see this bowl is full and that fuel pump bowl is full down there as well the gas looks a little bit yellow to me at first glance so there's a good chance it's been sitting for a while the other thing that's a little bit concerning as you can see on the carburetor there it's all wet from about here down to where it mates to the manifold so let's see yeah it definitely smells like fuel so it's also leaking on I think both sides of the butterfly shaft and it's leaking right there I don't know what's going on there let me show you something I found here if I grab the top of the carburetor and I move it back and forth first of all I can see fuel coming out right there watch see that so let's check the coolant I see some evidence of moisture perhaps some condensation but I don't see any coolant in there so hopefully maybe it's like 75 full and just needs a few quarts to top it off I don't know it could be completely empty but let's put a few quarts in there and see if it doesn't uh fill it up oh still isn't filling up let's uh try a little more all right we've got the coolant system back up to capacity where it should be and she was very low it's about uh probably almost a gallon low we know it's got Spark I know it's got fuel because the accelerator pump is working well you heard it try to fire off there a little bit got fuel and Spark the engine should be running so if you can see the spark plugs down there they're very old and Rusty and there's a lot of debris around the base of the spark plugs so I'm going to get some compressed air and blow all that away then we're going to hit all four of those with a bunch of penetrating oil because at some point we're going to want to take those out [Music] all right that's a little better all right let's have a look it's uh spark plug number one luckily it did come out holy cow it was completely fouled with uh Fuel and there's no way that thing was going to light off uh all right I actually attempted to clean the uh the electrode and the spark plug there and I've got in my antique tester I want you to watch right there it's supposed to make a spark right it wasn't making a spark at all and there was even smoke coming off of it so this spark plug is toast all right here's number two it was just as bad as number one was in the engine let's see if it makes a spark at all nope and for those of you out there that don't know what a spark plug is supposed to look like when it fires watch this one all right well I checked all four of the plugs and they're all bad number one and two were not sparking at all and number three and four we're just barely making a spark and it was very erratic so I'll run to the store and get some new plugs but before I put them all back in we'll do a compression test on all four cylinders just to make sure that the engine is healthy before we go any further the way I like to do these tests is remove all the spark plugs open the throttle all the way and make sure the choke is not engaged at all and as far as the numbers that we're hoping for here I think it should be so somewhere between 90 and 130 so that's the first thing that we're hoping for the second thing that we're hoping for is that all cylinders are pretty much the same you want them to be you know maybe within 10 percent of each other roughly all right so I'm going to get in the cab and crank it and uh we'll see what we get for number one foreign so number one we had about 80. number two we had 88 number three we had 85 and number four we had about 80 again and so if our target range was somewhere between let's say 90 and 130 then these are all a little bit low however this is not all bad news and I'll tell you why first of all all four cylinders are pretty darn consistent across the board well within our 10 percent range of variance so that's the first thing that's good the second thing that's good that may not be apparent is I happen to know that my compression tester reads Low it just does uh you know I bought off Amazon maybe a year and a half ago and I've used it a lot and it seems like the more I use the compression tester um the more sort of worn out the gauge gets but that's what you get when you buy a compression tester off Amazon for 40 bucks someday I'll get myself a good quality one but in the meantime this is what we got to work with so long story short I think we're just fine here with these values uh we got a couple things going on here we got the we've got the carburetor that's leaking quite profusely actually around the base and halfway up the the body of the carburetor itself like I said before there may or may not be a crack in there because it's it's kind of wobbling where it should not be wobbling so that's going to be an issue no matter what we do with the rest of the stuff but the primary reason it was not starting I think is because of the spark plugs all right so now I'm going to install four new spark plugs and we're going to go with AC Delco r45s foreign I also reattached the air intake hose to the top of the carburetor and there's even a crankcase breather that goes to the same place I got that attached so before we try to start it here let me tell you what I think has been going on not only is it leaking fuel but that probably means suck an air also so leaking Fuel and sucking air is kind of a double whammy so I would guess it's probably been very difficult to start in the past because of this and because it's been difficult to start in the past I'm assuming that people have used a lot of Choke and a lot of throttle to attempt to get it started and sometimes what happens with that is it just dumps way too much fuel into the cylinders and it ends up going by the Rings down into the oil in the crank case which if you remember at the beginning of the video when we checked the oil the oil level was over full and it was a little bit runny so despite the carburetor problem and despite the starter problem that we haven't even addressed yet I think the engine is going to fire up pretty quickly now that we've got new spark plugs in it and they're all dry so the system is not currently flooded with fuel so without further Ado let's see if this thing will start up and if it does I'm going to drive it right out of the shop and drive it around the property a little bit and and we'll get our eyeballs on the uh the exhaust to see if it's smoking or not and we'll also get our eyeballs on the engine to see if you got any blow-by or anything like that [Music] [Music] oh [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] all right well I think that was a success the charging system does seem to be working including the gauge in the cab so that's good I was getting about 6.5 volts at a slow idle so I'm making the assumption that at a higher RPM we'd be closer to seven volts and we have to add hood latch to the list of things to fix because even though the lever actuate sort of it doesn't lock into the uh the deal up there when you shut it uh the coolant system does not appear to be leaking um so I don't know why it was so low on coolant before I didn't run it for very long this time because we're just getting to know the truck but we're going to assume that the coolant system is working at this point in the cab here our amp meter was registering a little bit on the positive so that confirms my finding with the multimeter on the battery that our charging system is working a little bit the temp meter didn't have a chance to come up because he didn't run it very long the oil uh pressure meter did come up at an idle it was about 25 and a higher RPM it was about uh just below half so maybe 45 percent of the way up to meter so that tells me we have oil pressure uh the fuel gauge is red empty this whole time I don't know if that works or not all right probably took me about 40 minutes to get the starter removed it's just kind of hard to get your hands and the wrenches up in there where you need to get them so again the reason the starter is out of the vehicle because sometimes when you engage the starter it would make a horrendous grinding noise and it would not spin the engine I already got a glance at the flywheel so I think I know the direction we're gonna have to go but I want to show you this Bendix gear first before I show you the flywheel so this is not a surprise you can see how bad the teeth are right go all the way around they are all pretty much the same so if you use the Straight Edge as a guide and we look at the teeth again it really accentuates uh the wear so that's no good at the very minimum this gear needs to be replaced the other thing that's a little bit concerning is this feels pretty gummy to me it doesn't spin as freely as it should [Music] hmm anyway let's go take a look at the flywheel now we'll see what kind of condition it's in so I'm gonna find a way to get the camera mounted down there so we can see those teeth and then I will come up front get underneath the vehicle and put a one and three eighths wrench on that crankshaft pulley and give it a couple rotations while I record it you can see as we turn this around that a lot of the teeth on the flywheel are in very good condition however there are two places on the flywheel where the teeth are in bad condition so whenever the bad teeth on the flywheel are lining up with the starter that's when we were getting that terrible grinding noise because the teeth were not engaging they were just grinding against each other and not spinning the engine so there's nothing we can do to fix those teeth on the flywheel it will need to be replaced and that means the engine will have to come out probably going to do anyway down the road I was just hoping you weren't going to have to do it quite so soon but when the engine is out we can give it a really good look we can inspect the rear and Main seals and and also the clutch and the clutch components of course so I guess we'll do all that on the next video so this is going to be a long-term project or just at the tip of the iceberg right now and if you're following my other projects as well don't worry we're going to get back to those real soon I just wanted to get this initial video of the Willies posted so you guys can see uh this project and what we're dealing with it's going to be a lot of work but this is a really cool old rig and I think the end result is going to be well worth the effort thanks everybody for watching and we'll see you next time take care I just want to do one more thing before we wrap this video up and it's been bugging me that the hood latch is not working so I took the pin off here and adjusted it out a little bit so it's just a little bit longer maybe 3 16 7 inch longer and now it goes in and relaxes proper beans thank you and then of course you put the slide it puts onto and then it is completely secure and the latch mechanism actually works down here I also lubed up these uh spring latches on both sides so they're much easier to pull now and I love how this fits in the front [Music] [Music]

Channel: Antique Cars and Stuff

Views: 18,275

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Id: 9gcHTxA7rKM

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023