XJ Had No Oil Pressure. Swapping the Engine!

welcome back to the channel. I took the

engine

out here, it's, uh, but here's the thing in less than a week. I'm going to try to take this th000 x-ray on a 2000m road trip, but there's a hole right here, there's also a long list of other things that need to be done, but today we're going to focus on getting the new

engine

, starting it, Let's check that pulling the motor actually wasn't even that bad, since I'm getting pretty good at it. By removing the intake and exhaust manifolds from the head and all that, I ended up doing that to have easy access to the top two bellhousing bolts and then there are two more bellhousing bolts on the bottom end.

Remove the starter motor flex plate. the torque converter bolts, the plugs, the wires, everything that pulls the engine is not too bad here is the new engine, it is 97 um, it actually came with all the wiring harnesses and the PDC and the power lines vacuum and everything so I ripped it all out to get it to this point here are some of the parts wiring harness old style exhaust manifold old style intake manifold that alternator looks new we have a memory belt maybe we can reuse some of that stuff I'm going to make this engine look like this shot off the head and everything and since it's a 97 and this is a 2000, there are a few things we have to change, for example the ignition system with a distributor, while the new just uses a cam position sensor and on the oil pump drive so we have to change this to the new block I'll probably end up using some of these brackets and I'll probably use this water pump this one looks a little crunchy, Let's break it down, the first order of business is to put the top dead center of cylinder 1 on the compression stroke that we're going to.

To keep an eye on the intake valve here, I put a little white line on it so you can see when it opens, which it's right there, and when that valve closes, that means we're going up in compression, so Leave it there, we'll pull the head and bring it to true top dead center. We'll go around it again, but that's for the cam position sensor change. I was talking about removing these accessory brackets, removing all the spark plug wires. off and the distributor, if you've been keeping up with this here, 2000 Cherokee, you know, I bought it for $1,000 knowing it had coolant in the oil, that's why it was cheap and I thought since it was a 2000, it would be a broke 331 head, so the first thing we did was put a new Clear Water cylinder head on and that solved the problem, there was no more coolant in the oil, that's good, but then after we ran it for a while the engine The temperature that we lost rose. oil

pressure

down to zero so in the last video we did an oil pump and same thing there is no oil

pressure

after the engine warms up so at this point we are dealing with the worst case scenario.

I guess the previous owner just neglected it. was too long and let the coolant circulate too much through the oil and cleaned the cam bearings, at least that's what I think happened, so I jumped on Marketplace and found this locally for 300 bucks, low miles, good pressure oil, good oil, all that, ready to go. that old distributor out of here, we'll do the valve cover next, after we drain this oil from here, a lot of 7/16 bolts will come off next. The rocker arms will come off and although I bought new lifters and pushrods for this old engine, everything is in order.

Same thing, I think I'm going to use these rockers, these pushrods, and these lifters on the new head, so you know these guys have been working together for a long time, we don't want to split them up, so we're going to put them together. all this from front to back in the order they came out here in the cardboard box. This head is in excellent shape, although look how clean it is here, no mud buildup. Very clean. In fact, I'm very happy with it so far. Compared to the 331 head that came out of this engine right here, it's just packed with all kinds of nasty stuff.

Until now, next we will remove these head bolts. This might be a silly waste of time, but I like to break the head bolts. They come loose by hand, contrary to the torque pattern, so I'm going to go through and break all of these by hand and then we'll take them out with the gun. Next, we'll tear this head off here. We just tried it, maybe not, yeah I'm going to use the hoist, yeah it's a factory head gasket, it's fun to clean them, man this engine is clean. I hope I can get it to work, but it's clean in there, no mud.

I'm going to have to put the vacuum cleaner down there. I've got some of these pieces falling apart in there, but man, that's how clean it looks good, we'll start the water pump real quick that way this heater hose neck will be out of the way. I have to remove this bracket from the power steering bracket, it should be good to take it off as one now, the coolant is a different story, it's a little nasty, but it will be fine to get out the fluid vac to try to get rid of some of that nonsense, I vacuumed the coolant passage as best I could and then vacuumed the lifter valley.

Now I'm pushing rags down here like that when we clean the surface that we're spraying, we're scraping, to clean this, nothing falls off. in the lifter valley there and dirty it up or whatever now we're ready to clean the surface of the head, we've got all of our major food groups here, clean brake, uh, purple Power Degreaser Rags scraping tool and a razor blade which will also clean the mating um surface for the water pump also that was in time lapse by accident. I wasn't recording. I took out all the old rags and I'll finish cleaning this later.

I thought I had some scotchbrite pads but no. I replaced all the paper towels and this time pushed them in a little further to hold them against the risers. I'm going to start the engine and I don't want them to fall off. I don't want to take them either. they're just chilling in their bores, I'm not going to bother them and I'm going to take this oil filter off, we'll see, oh, that could have been bad, let's see if we can get a little more use out of it here, okay, let's go. turn it completely over and see what happens, you know what I believe.

I'm going to leave it like this because it's good enough to remove the pan, so I'm going to remove the pan through one of the engine oil pans. I took out it is much better and for two there is a new oil pump on that one that I want to put here, what a clean engine, shit, here is the old engine. I turned it over and put it in the same place and here are all of ours. hard work from the last video now this gasket could have been reusable but I ordered another one anyway and here is our new pump and pickup tube so I'm going to clean this up along with the mating surface for the pan gasket. well, everything clean looks good.

I was going to do it. I actually bought a new rear main seal. I was going to, but this one almost looks new. You can still see how orange it is. I feel like this was done before the crankcase gasket was removed. obviously done so I'm wondering if that's why it came off so I'm not going to get into that because it's a pain in the ass you have to take off this whole brace and take off the bearing cap and all that so now i'll take the nice new oil pump from the old engine, throw it in there, got the new one nice and clean, put the gasket in there and now torqued them to 18 ft-lbs and got RTV just a little bead where the oil cover timing meets the block here and then where the rear bearing cap meets the block, I've got the little Snapper in there too.

I don't know why because it should be pretty simple with the motor reversed, now we can put our new rubber gasket on like this. sitting nicely on the bearing cap back here, now we can put the oil pan on top and put some bolts in, all the hardware is torqued up to 10 ft-lbs. I also have the supports and stuff where they should be, um. I'm going to crank this motor so everything is done now on the bottom and that's pretty much all I have time for today. I'm going to clean up around here and we'll do it again tomorrow for sometime. two actions.

I worked a little. I took a lot of the engine mounts and things that I pulled out, they looked much better like the alternator mount and the AC mount. I'm going to wait to put them together with the power steering. stand that way there's just more space uh, when we put it in there, those things are easy to put in later. I had this new water pump in stock so I put it in, I also put a new water pump gasket in there and then off I went. I got out some Scotchbrite pads, so I finished cleaning the surface of the head, I cleaned everything and vacuumed, I got all the rags out, so this is pretty good, but one thing that's pretty crucial is that you want to finish with some compressed air and blow out all these head bolt holes, make sure there is no water in there, don't clean them, so everything is fine, I changed the oil pressure sensor with the plug and even changed the engine mounting brackets.

One that came out of the Jeep had this heat shield on the driver's side, probably for the mission in California, so I put it there to make everything the same, so this block now looks a lot like what it had when it came out. so it's almost ready to go. The last thing to do is the cam position sensor I was talking about that goes in place of the distributor that was on this '97 block, so I thought I'd show you how to put it on. That's because there's a little bit more to it than just

swapping

parts, so remember at the beginning of the video, when we got this engine, the top dead center on the compression stroke, that's where it comes into play, so we'll get to it. to top dead center I have a dial indicator set up here, the harmonic balancer is marked with a notch at top dead center, so in case that doesn't happen you can use a dial indicator to accurately find top dead center , so we're just going to See where the dial indicator maxes out, so it's like two 2.25.

We're going to turn it all the way back. Check again. This is the escape race. Now see if it comes back right there. 2.25 and then we will return. there's our intake and we're back to compression, so we're going to take it up to that point again, so now that we're at true top dead center, you can see that that timing mark that I marked in white lines up with zero, we're going to move on to this engine. I already have it at top dead center and I'll show you what to do with that. Now here are two little 730 second bolts holding this top part on.

There's no need. do this I just want to show you want to grab two toothpicks okay maybe you can see it there on this inside part there's a hole right there and if you look on the outside there's a hole right there and dead center superior. those holes should line up so you can stick the toothpick in there like that and then there's a 1/2 inch bolt that holds this retainer, take that bolt out, take the retainer out and this guy should just pop it out like this and then the second toothpick teeth that it is for you to go back in is a little different, it's not that bad, you have to keep an eye on the oil pump drive that this flat head part slides into and I don't know if you noticed when we took it out , but it's a little bit of a twist when we come out, we want the sensor to face back like this, there we go, but if it doesn't go in, just insert a flathead screwdriver in there to twist the oil pump unit and that will fix it.

We can put the retainer on and now that the retainer is locked we can take out our toothpick and then all we have to do is put the top plate back on since it's a four stroke engine and it goes to top dead center twice, there's an Es You might be off time 180° and you'll know pretty quickly when that happens, if it happens, for all I know this could be because I was turning it over while cleaning it. I thought I was following the lead, but I guess. We'll see if that happens, take the cover off, turn the motor until the holes line up again here, make sure it's at top dead center, all you're going to do is take this out and make one full revolution here until it's at the top dead center again and then we put it back on Bol.

It should be ready, that should be all the prep work we need to do before we take it off the engine mount, so we'll move it up here. on the yoink machine, take it off the motor mount, then we need to put on the dust shield and flex plate, then we are ready to put it on the mount and this is pretty easy to understand, you can see why, aha. I've got the flex plate here along with that ring or whatever plus the bolts and the torque spec on these is 105 ft-lb which is pretty strong and considering there's no compression on the top this thing is going to spin very easily. when I'm going to press these um, maybe I need to call Courtney or I could try to put something in here or maybe I can give her abig hug to this thing, holding a key here while I squeeze here, I think that's what I'm going to do.

Try, hey, one more thing before we try to stab this here, we need to make sure that our flex plate lines up with our torque converter, uh, with the four bolts, so my recommendation to you is to put this directly on. and down and you can use that bottom bolt and this top notch as a reference and then come here using this top bolt as a reference to line up one of these. It's the next day again, let's try it. Putting this engine on a couple of things to keep an eye out for these Dow pins sticking out of the block they need to line up with the transmission and then obviously the engine rebounds need to line up on the sides so let's try it okay I have both.

The main bell bolts started, so that's where we'll leave it. Now we'll try to focus on getting it. Our engine mounts are lined up, put a bolt through there and then we can take the hoist out of here, put the nut on, try this other side, here we go, we put the two lower bell housing bolts on and we tighten the torque now for the top two, would highly recommend. Recommending that you replace your E12 Torx bolts with regular hex bolts makes it a lot easier and I'll be able to get it from the top side with a ratchet wrench to tighten it so I'll do that below and then we'll move on. below see how well aligned our flex plate with the torque converter, tighten them and tighten them well, we are here below.

I don't know how well you can see it, but I think everything stayed aligned, so I'm going to give it a try. and put a bolt in to see what happens, check it actually started out really sweet, so I'm going to adjust this one. I'm going to try tightening them to 40t lb, look at this, I've got the breaker bar and there's a hole. Right here on the monocoque, now I'm going to rotate it a full 180° to get the bolt on the opposite side. I tightened them all in there and then got the dust shield on the bottom dust shield, I also put the starter on and put all these brackets for the transmission cooler line to finish up there for now before putting the cylinder head on.

Try to route this wiring harness and things where they are supposed to be. Took a bunch of pictures and plugged things in, all that wiring harness is routed great, looks good, cleaned it too and well, vacuumed and then cleaned with the brake, cleaned the head one more time, so it was nice and clean , we're ready to hook up to our nice Clean the water butt once I've got it hanging on the chain there, I'm going to clean the bottom of it, it's probably fine, but just to make sure it's sprayed with some brake cleaning , wipe it pretty clean, looks good, head gaskets are ready to go and never.

I forgot to put in the right rear corner head bolt before putting it in the Jeep, I hand tightened them all and we are ready to tighten them. I also had to remove the thermostat because I forgot to put in this water pump. uh heater hose thing anyway so there are three different specs and then we have to do it in a sequence so first it's 22 and then we're going to spiral. Also remember that this front passenger bolt has thread sealant because it goes. Then in the cooling passage we're going to bump it up to 45 ftlb and then take it up to 110 for our final Torx spec, with the exception of the front end where we put thread sealant and we're going to back it up to 100 since the push rods and the lifter rockers are already mates with each other, I'm not going to use assembly lube, I'm just going to use a little bit of zinc oil and then make sure the pushrod seats in the lifter bowl rockers.

As we warm up again, we hand tighten them all, now we will tighten them to 19 ft-lbs. All that's left is something pretty simple, it just takes some time to do, but I'm ready to turn this on, so let's get to it. Alright, everything is back together and we're ready to fire it up, we just need to add oil. I already have a new filter there. 6 quarts of uh Rotella 10w30. Well, that's all the cooling. I didn't have much, it wasn't enough to fill. but it's pretty good, let's turn it on. I don't know what's going to happen, let's just do it.

You shouldn't have to prime anything because there are no really new parts. Its alive. Oh yeah, oil pressure. Oh yeah, we have oil pressure. Well, well, we've turned up the temperature, as you can see, and we still have good oil pressure, very good oil pressure, in fact, this sounded very quiet even though it's like it's flipping the head open right now. Once I put the exhaust in the video below, we will be able to appreciate it a lot more because of how quiet it is, but it doesn't leak at all. It looks pretty good. It works well.

I turned up the heat, so that's it. I hope you enjoyed it, take it easy. See you next time