Apparently elderly pickups of questionable provenance get a pretty warm welcome around here. That being the case, I may as well throw my tinfoil hat into the ring and offer my old Jeep J20 for your collective amusement. I bought this thing in December of 2012, just over eight years ago as of this writing, and the easiest way to tell the story is to copy and paste from another forum. I will try to tidy it up as I go and remove conversation that isn't native to GRM to avoid unnecessary confusion. The fact that I own and love this rolling atrocity is confusing enough.
It'll take a day or three to get this patched over in between Christmas prep, toddler duty, and general middle-age malaise. Each entry will be italicized and marked with the date it was originally posted to lend some semblance of continuity and segregate current chatter from rehashed leftovers. So here goes.
09 Dec 2012:
Basic background: I've never had a pickup before. I've always driven sports cars and the wife has had station wagons (I'm counting our '95 Grand Cherokee as a station wagon) for utility, but we really need something to haul typical homeowner junk around and I don't really need two MR2s. I wanted four wheel drive, something with enough character to be interesting, and capable enough to keep around for at least a decade or maybe forever. I always like obscure and unique stuff and for that reason have been drawn to full size Jeep pickups. I was also interested in Comanches, since they are newer, much more modern (though still very dated), easier to feed, drive, and park, potentially easier to maintain and modify than an FSJ.
I found a couple of J20s on our local craigslist. One had rust in the body and needed a few repairs right away, and since it had Quadra-Trac (potentially more trouble than I wanted to deal with), I skipped it. The other one was advertised as an '84. The description indicated it ran, but would not idle, and it sounded relatively promising. The seller was asking cheap money. Here are the photos from the CL ad. They're tiny, but that's all the seller had.
Friday, I posted on garagejournal.com asking for guidance on FSJs and Comanches and got a tremendous response. A few suspected or confirmed IFSJA members as well as some others were kind enough to chime in with tons of helpful hints and guidance. Armed with that and plenty of warnings about the many places I was likely to find rust, I went out yesterday morning to meet the seller of the red '84. Here is what I found.
Powertrain is as expected: 360/727/208 with Dana 44 front and 60 rear, both tags showing 3.73 41 11 (assuming this means 41 tooth ring and 11 tooth pinion, which is of course 3.73:1). Looks like a base model with vinyl bench seat and AM radio, though it does have cruise control and factory air conditioning. The engine compartment and undercarriage appeared totally unmolested. All the smog equipment is there. A/C compressor and lines are all intact. Even the air cleaner is stock.
The seller borrowed the battery out of his Dodge pickup and the Jeep fired right up. There was some blue smoke out of the tailpipe for the first few minutes, some noise from the smog pump, a few rattles from the exhaust system, but nothing gruesome. It did not want to idle until we played with the idle speed screw a little. Still sounds a little choppy, and I'm sure it is long overdue for a tune-up and carburetor rebuild. I heard an intermittent tap or rattle but it was very sporadic. I'm assuming that a flattened cam, loose valve, etc would be steadier. The big transmission cooler was present.
After it warmed up, we drove it around the neighborhood a little. The tires are heavily cracked and there are no license plates so we kept it to nearby streets. No real play in the steering, which is absurdly over-boosted. Brakes need freshening up and it probably wants some shocks, but it shifted well enough. Hubs (Warn on passenger side, something else on the left) engaged as they should and 4-Hi went in without difficulty. 4-Lo was a grind going in or out whether in gear or not. We tried both sitting still and driving slowly and it just didn't want to play. It did go in with the engine off, but still a bit of a hassle.
There are minor problems with the body. The seat has had some goofy repair involving a few inches of rebar. The driver's door cannot be opened from the outside unless the lock plunger is also held upward from inside the door. There was some water under the floormat, and I don't know if this is due to the door window having been left down or due to a leak somewhere else. The headliner is sagging. There are of course little battle scars around the doors and bed, but nothing catastrophic. The grille bars are broken and removed, so only the surround remains on the truck. Door mirrors had been removed.
Front and rear bumpers appear to be factory stock. There's a Class III hitch, an aftermarket intermittent wiper control pod, some ribbed aluminum running boards, and and two auxiliary fuel tanks in the bed (approximately 13 gal left and 15 gallons on the right) that are pretty rusty on the inside. Other than that, stock as a rock.
Speaking of rust, I went over and under this thing pretty carefully.
Checked the inner fenders. No rust.
Checked the cowl. No rust.
Checked the seam around the bed floor as well as I could from the outside. No rust.
Checked the bottom edge of the doors. No rust.
Checked the floor under the rubber mat. No rust.
Checked the tailgate. No rust.
Checked the floor from below. No rust.
Checked the fuel tank, skid plate, and frame area. No rust. Not even any debris.
So I bought it. As the seller handed me the title, I noticed that it was an '85, not an '84 as advertised.
