It was a nice day in the Burq today so in addition to working on some lawn care stuff and other outdoor projects, I put in some time on the '78. Changed a couple of vacuum hoses (ended up just plugging the feed for the interior accessories (heater, quadratrac control, cruise)). I have a few more I need to change out but spraying carb cleaner around the other existing lines didn't seem to indicate any leaks. Ran it for a while and then changed to oil (hasn't been changed in way too long). Jeep runs better than it has in a long time but still has power under load issues, I'm guessing probably carb and/or timing related. I also suspect I might have a head gasket issue due to some white smoke at idle but that could be that it has been stored and not seriously run in a while.
Thinking about making my own leak down tester and seeing if I can diagnose it. If it is a leaky/blown head gasket, I'll probably just concentrate on the engine swap, assuming the "new" engine doesn't have any significant problems. And segueing into the '74, it is pretty much "ready to pull engine" condition, the only things connected are the engine & transmission mounts.
The story on the '74 is that the guy I bought it from drove it regularly a number of years for outdoor stuff (hunting/fishing) and then his buddy convinced him to swap the drivetrain into a Wagoneer. He got it swapped and then changed his mind, swapping it back into the Cherokee. At that point, he pretty much gave up since the wiring had been stripped out (for the swap I guess) and he couldn't (or didn't want to) get everything wired back up.
Now I am a little undecided where to go with it; do I wire it up enough to get it to fire to verify that it will run, do I do some diagnostics (compression check, maybe leak down test if I end up putting one together) and go from there, or are there some other tests that can be done on a "stored" engine? I know it doesn't have coolant, I haven't actually verified that the oil was drained yet. He did store it with some MMO in the cylinders so I'm hoping there won't be any issues there.
Since I'm going to have it pulled anyway, would the best course be some tear down to verify cylinder & bearing condition? (Maybe throw in a rv cam?
) I would really like to keep the costs down if possible. I'm hoping the '74 engine will be a "good enough" runner so my vague ideas of either taking my time to either rebuild the original engine or do a diesel swap may come to fruition before any other major engine work is needed.
Sorry this post is kind of rambling on, it's been a long day and I'm beat.