Will It Run & Drive? 1976 Postal Jeep Revival (Parked in the Woods for YEARS!)

[Music] oh all right well something broke her free she was real tight pretty hard on the old clutch on the tractor but she's finally seeming to move either the wheels broke free or we pulled it up out of the hole either way she's coming on with us now so here we go oh yeah little ford's not having too much trouble [Music] well this is definitely interesting this would be a lot easier with two people someone to steer we're doing it okay and we'll still probably get to work on time howdy my friends and welcome to the channel today i'm luke thunderhead 289 here on youtube and we're back working on the jeep again today if you remember from our last video we got it fired up after it sat for who knows how long and it ran really clean you know after getting the carb kind of adjusted and the timing somewhere where it could run you know it lit right off and it idled but in the big the big butt here it had no oil pressure and it has a clear center tube mechanical gauge and it was hardly moving any oil in that tube now i had previously pulled the dipstick the oil looked pretty clean so i was gonna fire it let it warm up and drop the oil but given the sounds of the engine you know knocking like a jehovah's witness i'm like yeah let's not run it anymore until we figure something out so anyway today we have some 2050 oil the oil in it was real thin you know real fuel-y smelling and thin so hopefully today with some thick oil we can regain some oil pressure otherwise either we have some bearing issues or our oil pump is probably extremely hashed and everything always gets parked for a reason and that might be why the jeep ended up where it was so anyway with that let's jump right in we can get some oil pressure in this thing i think it'll be a pretty good runner let's find out here we go kind of a tight fit i could have jacked it up i guess there's not a lot of metal it's got a magnetic drain plug not a whole lot on there which is a really good sign you know and that is like that is just watery thin oil so you know given that this vehicle might have 250 350 000 miles you know at least 150 000 miles you know it's no surprise that these old engines need a little bit thicker oil to hold some oil pressure but this stuff is thin so i'm still mildly optimistic and it would be a shame i mean the frame on this vehicle is really nice it'd be really good if we could get a runner out of her so here's our quintessential magnetic drain plug and you can see from when i wiped it off here there wasn't any big chunks on it uh oh i hate to feel optimistic because often times in life when you have any sliver of optimism you just get punished but now with the thicker oil in and we got a drill on the oil pump spinning it um if you remember from our last video you know we were spinning the daylights out of that thing and we weren't getting any i mean i can see the clear sender the nylon line weren't getting any oil up that thing hardly unless i had excessive rpm now on the drill i can feel resistance at the oil pump with the thicker oil and i'm seeing oil go up the cinder tube so maybe we might get lucky and have some oil pressure hate to be so optimistic but it's looking a lot better got our redneck oil pump driver in here and there's our little nylon tube and you can see when i hit the drill boom it's flowing some oil and there's resistance on the drill where previously there wasn't so that's literally the resistance of trying to push oil through bearings that aren't moving and so anyway previously we didn't have that and now we do so i'm pretty encouraged to drop the distributor back in and try and run it i like that redneck oil pump driver it's a prime unit right there now stabbing this distributor ends going to be real easy because technically i cheated i made a mark here on the base of the distributor i made a mark on the block and then i made a mark as to where the rotor was pointing which you can see that little scratch mark there so in that way if we get everything lined up obviously you have a helical gear here on your distributor but if we pre-clock it and then set it in that should rotate right into place and then you know we'll probably be within five degrees of timing close enough where the engine will at least fire up the key thing when you have a distributor out if you do this method is just don't roll the engine over is once you turn it over everything's going to be somewhere else but this should be pretty easy with what we've done here today just to get a quick look you know you can see pull the distributor up a little bit and that rotor rotates so since we want to be lined up right here before i dropped it in i pre-clocked it a little bit so we just you know it goes in sits down everything's sitting down so we know our oil pump is engaged if we don't move this all over the place and you see how the body of the distributor moves which alters timing and that's why and it's going to be hard to see here but again i made a mark on the base of the distributor and the block and if i line those up and line up the rotor again timing will be pretty close all right the distributor is bolted back in it's plugged back in we should be good to go hopefully we can crank the thing and i don't know what i did with the keys i put them in the back of this seat probably behind all these things fun you can see our auxiliary gas tank oh i'm glad i came back here from our last video should probably turn the valve on that would help you kindly get out of the way there tada the keys all right my non-dominant hand is not very intelligent and nothing oh it's not just my non-dominant hand that's not very intelligent apparently an engine needs a battery to be able to run who knew all right batteries in pillaged from the maverick of course all right here we go give it a few squirts here we'll see if we can just roll it over and it'll fire off it is a good running unit you know other than the oil pressure anomaly which hopefully we've corrected still could be the gauge i'm not really sure but i can see the oil in that clear tube again you know so if we're not seeing any movement there it's not the best indication of engine health let's just see if we can get anything it does fire right to life a little bit of movement there nothing on the gauge you can hear valve train you can hear a lot of things it's a shame it runs so good it's not even really smoking that bad strange i'm just very suspicious of the oil scenario [Music] oh yeah it's kind of like hardly anything on the stick there we'll get some trans fluid in it and fire it back up again all of our tires from being out in the woods seemed to hole there except for that one that one's not so good gonna get our tire all aired up here with our trusty jump pack and ghetto compressor but someone must have high hopes for this thing at one point which further would lead one to believe that there is or was you know a mechanical issue which we've definitely found something notable but i mean the tires are super super new i mean they're old but these have like zero road time on them kind of interesting [Applause] so with that if you remember the brakes they go to the floor from sitting seems like i don't know brake fluid just evaporates or goes into the fourth dimension not really sure cars that sit though the brake reservoir is always empty and this is a neat one it's way down here on the passenger side we might be able to get a camera angle on this although i can't look at the camera and see what i'm doing so maybe that's going where it's supposed to oh yep yep that was plenty get over there oh yeah they're both full good job me the brakes do still go mostly to the floor but i can feel something on the piston it's getting stouter and stouter so maybe for a little yard drive we might have some resemblance of brakes and that would be nice still nothing on the oil pressure gauge so with 2050 i'm getting a little suspicious she's gonna idle a little bit here would be nice don't hear anything at the moment oh yeah beginning to think we might be working with a rod knock that's where all of our oil pressure is going you know because the bearing clearance is so big the thing about a rod knock is you'll be able to tell as you put it under a load it'll get louder definitely seems rod knocky right there looking at an engine that might have a rod knock there's three different sounds you'll typically hear okay you're gonna hear valve train rod knock exhaust leak they all sound super similar now valve train noises will just increase with rpm they will not get louder with load they should stay all about the same pitch they'll just continue to speed up with rpm naturally now exhaust leaks and connecting rod issues are very similar the biggest difference is as the engine warms up typically a rod knock is going to get louder as the oil thins where an exhaust leak will typically be louder when the engine's cold and as things warm up and heat up they'll close up a little bit more and quiet down not always the case between those two but given this scenario where oil pressure is very questionable you know and the vehicle was parked in the woods and the weeds i definitely suspect that it has an engine related issue you know namely being a rod knock so with that i think i'm going to throw some very thick oil in here and just see if we can get it to go down the road now this is something i would never recommend doing we're putting differential fluid in here which will most likely snap the distributor or something but you know it might just give us enough where we can drive it down the road without throwing a connecting rod through the block which you know i'm like 95 percent sure that's what we're hearing here and basically from a rebuild standpoint you're going to need a new connecting rod and a new crank both of those will be much too hashed to be able to have machined and bring back to life you know they'll just be so worn down from a connecting rod issue so as long as we don't throw a rod through the block we're not really hurting the engine anymore that's essentially already been hurt it's definitely going to need a full rebuild this isn't surprising it's probably got an astounding amount of miles on it all right it's got thick oil in it i don't expect to see any oil pressure still the tires aired up got some fluid in the brakes where we have some suggestion of a pedal and our trans has had some fluid added in so hopefully that's gonna work out so with that let's give it a crank and see if we can drive around oh come on little buddy [Music] she is not happy you know idle for me we go into drive and we might not have a trans either oh there we go good old chrysler transmission just has to spool the trans up for a second look at this thing rolling smoke out back got the old mosquito fogger going [Music] [Music] [Music] well the good news is it can go downhill okay the brakes kind of work look how wobbly it is oh boy the trans is actually starting to work better [Music] all right so i think that's that that was a frightening drive anyone who drove these like back in the day definitely deserves i don't know some sort of an award so with that you know the tour converter is pretty hashed or something in the trans it doesn't have enough power to get up this hill so we're gonna pull it on home with the ford it's interesting definitely a unique vehicle but it's a well past its service life obviously makes good sense why someone left it out in the woods in the weeds oh not win any land speed records today on the old ford at least you can always rely on the boards around here to get some work done this is a weird one i've done nothing extra it's a couple days later you know tuesday wednesday and it was the weekend when i last tried to drive this thing and i had to move it on my property and i thought we'll just try and put it in drive and move it again like normal and the weirdest thing happened after it sat there for a second it all of a sudden started driving like normal now when you put it in drive the thing moves like it should never seen it before don't have a good explanation maybe a heat cycle or something also it's smoking notably less today so i don't know you know from sitting and a heat cycle going through it maybe it freed things up i'm not going to complain because it's night and day better let's go for a little drive so in classic form here we have the jump pack all strapped in because the old battery is of course ancient and isn't going to do anything so smashed my finger that was fun all right gonna start up on that thing there we go not too bad now here's the coolest part check this out reverse oh and the brakes work now oh brakes work pretty good drive so i don't know really what transpired here but i'm not complaining and it arguably runs quite a bit better rocks the whole thing back and forth i'm sure the shocks are wore out pretty wild it's not a mosquito fogger anymore seems surprisingly healthy all of a sudden again i'm not going to complain i don't know what changed other than a heat cycle but i'll take it [Music] um [Music] [Music] so now the question is what do i ultimately do with the jeep well you know i got other things around the farm like the tractor and the 76 f-250 so for me it would probably just end up sitting around quite a bit and it's just too good of a vehicle for that in my opinion and so anyway um ended up selling it to a rural mail carrier who's gonna do a body swap and put the thing on a four-wheel drive chassis so you know it's ultimately going to a good home and i'm glad we could get it out of its hole and send it on down the road where it'll be appreciated [Music] [Music] someone's gun [Music]

Channel: ThunderHead289

Views: 98,060

Keywords: junkyard digs, vice gripe garage, vgg, dylanmccool, deboss garage, will it run, wir video, revival, first start, abandoned car, parked for years

Id: C-C3koYDOVk

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021