Parking Brake

Last night I was able to finish up installing the hand brake I bought from an earlycj5.com member. Since there was no parking brake for it when my dad bought the Jeep, he and my brother installed a foot operated one from a late model CJ5. The problem was it did not have the throw needed to be of much use and would barely engage the parking brake. It was also close to the clutch pedal so you had to be careful when engaging the clutch. Here is a picture of the parking brake after I removed it from the Jeep (I forgot to take one before I removed it):

Since the original hand brake was torn out long ago I had to fabricate up a mount for the cable to attach to the transfer case cross brace. I used a piece of angle iron that I cut with my new reciprocating saw and drilled two holes, one to mount the brake cable and the other to bolt it down to the cross member. Here is what I came up with:

I figured out where to mount the hand brake in the cab:

And hooked up the cable to the parking brake:

If you have never seen a parking brake on an early CJ5 it is a cool design, the brake is attached to the output shaft of the transfer case which will lock up the drive train to the rear wheels. There is a major design problem with putting a brake there, the transfer case is prone to leaking, and yep, you guessed it, will lube up the parking brake rendering it pretty useless. Here is a picture of the drum parking brake:

The hand brake has plenty of throw to engage the parking brake now, so it may be a little more useful on the trail.

Emmissions test

You are probably asking yourself: Why would a 1965 vehicle even need to be tested, especially since there were no emission equipment installed or even required in '65? Well I guess some politicians back in 1984 decided vehicle emission testing was a good idea (which it is) and they had to pick a cut-off year for exemptions so in their wisdom they used a nice round number like, oh, 20 years. I guess nobody had a brother or cousin working as an auto mechanic to point out the fact that emission equipment wasn't added to vehicles until the 70's. So if my Jeep would have been titled one year earlier it would be exempt from emission testing in Ada County.

Ok, now that I got that off my chest, I do feel better by the way, I can get to the test results. My first try at passing the emissions test was early April of 2008, the Jeep failed miserably in all but the 2500 RPM CO%. You can see here that my HC (Hydrocarbons) were off the chart, which basically means that unburned fuel was being expelled from the engine and out the exhaust. Which was very evident since you could tell the engine was missing when it ran. The image below shows the Standard column as the highest amount of gasses you can expell and still pass as you can see by the Test column I didn't do so well:


So, I had to figure out why the engine wasn't burning fuel. It was either the carb or the ignition that was causing the problem so I went about working on both. I ended up rebuilding the carb and upgrading the points distributor to an electronic distributor. (which will both be covered in a blog post when I get around to writing them) I also changed the air filter, oil filter and oil, got the engine good and hot right before my second test (which I took just a few days prior to my registration being revoked) and crossed my fingers hoping for the best. Here are the results of my second test:

BOOYAH! It passed with plenty of room to spare. So now that it will be legal to drive on the streets I should get to work installing the seat belts and a parking brake.