For Want of a Bolt

For want of a nail the shoe was lost;

For want of a shoe the horse was lost;

For want of a horse the battle was lost;

For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost—

All for the want of a horse-shoe nail.

    This past week, I spent several days putting a new engine into Theseia.  This is the second time I've swapped the engine in her.  The last was about 9 years ago, and was the reason she and I were separated for all that time.

    Theseia is named for the classic philosophy problem, the Ship of Theseus.  For those not familiar:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

— Plutarch, Theseus

    When I purchased her, Theseia had the classic 258 inline 6 with a 2-barrel carburetor.  Theseia is a 1976 CJ-7, which raises an interesting question, because the 2-barrel carburetor was not introduced in America until 1979.  This means that at the very least, the original intake manifold had been replaced, and more likely, the entire engine.

    That 258 never ran right, so I decided to replace it with a V8.  I (like every AMC Jeep owner) toyed with the idea of a Chevy 350, but I decided instead to stay AMC and put in a 304.  Working for Tennessee Med Tech wages at the time, I had to scrape together all my savings and liquidate an asset to put together the princely sum of $650.

    Recently, I purchased the 360 that I am working on putting in and a backup 304 for $400, so make of that what you will.

    Anyway, the 304 I purchased had apparently been lowered a wee bit energetically when removed, and the oil pump housing was cracked.  I jumped on the Jeep Forum and bought a used one for $15 or so.  When it arrived, I threw it on the engine and promptly went out with my brother for a test drive.

    Unfortunately, I forgot to reassemble the oil pressure relief valve.

It goes right there.

    And so it was that my brother and I blew all the oil out of the engine all over the back roads of McMinn County.  We got about 20 minutes of use out of the engine before it started making funny noises.  By the time I figured out what had gone wrong, the engine was seized.

    I was out of discretionary money (indeed, shortly thereafter, we began to accrue debt after the Shieldmaiden quit her job to stay home with the kids), so Theseia sat.  And sat.  About 2 years later, we finally recognized that we couldn't make ends meet in Tennessee and moved to Montana.  The next year, Theseia made it as far as my parents' cabin in Michigan.  It took many more years until we could arrange to haul her out to Montana, and so she sat and sat some more.  All told, she's been sitting for the next best thing to a decade.

    All for want of 2 minutes' labor.

    Anyway, the new engine is in, though there's still a few more days of work to get it running.  More importantly, the brake system needs to be purged so that she'll stop.  

    But this time, I put the oil in and have been letting it sit for a week to make sure there's no leaks before I start her up.