Cruisers and Co
Supporting Vendor
- Joined
- Mar 30, 2023
- Threads
- 2
- Messages
- 146
- Location
- Erie, Colorado
- Website
- www.cruisersandcompany.com
Rosie Ruby is a 3H4 Medium Red K292 1997 Fzj80 full blown poverty pack edition... No lockers, fabric interior, no roof rack, no rub rails and most importantly no sunroof.
She's a rare beaut...
@shellb has an eye for these beauts. When he saw her on the craigslist he had to have her and immediately contacted the owner to work out a deal. A new chapter was starting for Rosie Ruby and pretty soon she was on a transport from Arizona to Colorado. Upon getting to Colorado @shellb knew she needed some love. With nearly 250K miles on her she was dirty, tired, underpowered and in need of some enhancements. Chance had it that @shellb stopped into a neighboring business, Air Down Gear Up (ran by @suprarx7nut) and stumbled upon us, the new shop in town Cruisers and Company. After some online searching @shellb reached out to us, decided to stop by to meet us and see what directions Rosie Ruby could potentially go. We formulated a game plan and pretty soon we had a heading....
Phase 1: Overall health check and some Eaton E-lockers...K292 K294
To start this project off we decided a compression test was the correct thing to do before diving into anything else. Was the mighty 1FZ in Rosie that tired or was there more at play here? I could tell something was off by listening to the old gal and after testing all 6 cylinders with rapidly dropping compression numbers we knew we needed a more in depth look at was going on. Out came the leakdown tester, straight to cylinder #6, which was the lowest, and shockingly it was so bad that I had second thoughts about my OTC tester and checked the gauge on cylinder 1 and then double checked cylinder 1 of my own, known to be extremely healthy, 97 LX450 to really make sure the gauge didn't just flat out die. It seemed the gauge was reading correctly so I set cylinder 6 up again and got the same results... 90 PSI in, Holding 20 PSI... YIKES this was not looking good. Removed the leakdown tester, dropped the piston to the bottom of it's stroke and sent in the borescope....
Yup... Burnt Valves... Sent an email with some photos and gave a shout over to @shellb with the bad news. This was a major development and not exactly what either of us had hoped to find. Some ideas were tossed around on what we could do for Rosie's heart... At the end of the day it was decided we'd move forward with the lockers and circle back to the motor in Phase 2. Rosie will have 35's here soon and during the locker install we added 4:88's, a solid spacer, and a complete knuckle job to the work order for some mechanically fresh axles. In the interior @shellb opted to use the OEM dial, which we tied into the factory wiring so that the dash functioned properly, to create a clean OEM look. The Eaton electronics were mounted high up on the driver side firewall to keep them away from any water and heat. Whipped up a quick stainless bracket on our plasma table for those electronics and the installation was complete.
She's a rare beaut...
@shellb has an eye for these beauts. When he saw her on the craigslist he had to have her and immediately contacted the owner to work out a deal. A new chapter was starting for Rosie Ruby and pretty soon she was on a transport from Arizona to Colorado. Upon getting to Colorado @shellb knew she needed some love. With nearly 250K miles on her she was dirty, tired, underpowered and in need of some enhancements. Chance had it that @shellb stopped into a neighboring business, Air Down Gear Up (ran by @suprarx7nut) and stumbled upon us, the new shop in town Cruisers and Company. After some online searching @shellb reached out to us, decided to stop by to meet us and see what directions Rosie Ruby could potentially go. We formulated a game plan and pretty soon we had a heading....
Phase 1: Overall health check and some Eaton E-lockers...
To start this project off we decided a compression test was the correct thing to do before diving into anything else. Was the mighty 1FZ in Rosie that tired or was there more at play here? I could tell something was off by listening to the old gal and after testing all 6 cylinders with rapidly dropping compression numbers we knew we needed a more in depth look at was going on. Out came the leakdown tester, straight to cylinder #6, which was the lowest, and shockingly it was so bad that I had second thoughts about my OTC tester and checked the gauge on cylinder 1 and then double checked cylinder 1 of my own, known to be extremely healthy, 97 LX450 to really make sure the gauge didn't just flat out die. It seemed the gauge was reading correctly so I set cylinder 6 up again and got the same results... 90 PSI in, Holding 20 PSI... YIKES this was not looking good. Removed the leakdown tester, dropped the piston to the bottom of it's stroke and sent in the borescope....
Yup... Burnt Valves... Sent an email with some photos and gave a shout over to @shellb with the bad news. This was a major development and not exactly what either of us had hoped to find. Some ideas were tossed around on what we could do for Rosie's heart... At the end of the day it was decided we'd move forward with the lockers and circle back to the motor in Phase 2. Rosie will have 35's here soon and during the locker install we added 4:88's, a solid spacer, and a complete knuckle job to the work order for some mechanically fresh axles. In the interior @shellb opted to use the OEM dial, which we tied into the factory wiring so that the dash functioned properly, to create a clean OEM look. The Eaton electronics were mounted high up on the driver side firewall to keep them away from any water and heat. Whipped up a quick stainless bracket on our plasma table for those electronics and the installation was complete.
