A Story about a 10 engine and it's trip across the country.

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Jimny
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A Story about a 10 engine and it's trip across the country.

Post by Jimny »

I bought my first LJ in 1988 or there about. I use to own a salvage yard and one of my best customers came in one day and said he had an old jeep style Suzuki and that is was not a Samurai, so I went to his house and bought it right there on the spot, took it back to my shop and had it running in 10 minutes after cleaning the points and spark plugs. It was a 1971 LJ10 Left hand drive.

Now to the story of the 10 engine and it’s travel across the USA.

I had the 10 for about a year when __TR__ and I took it down to Jane Missouri to a large camp ground to do some 4x4’n because we heard there were a lot of places around there to do just that, so anyway we unload the 10 and drove over to the river (I call it a stream but it is officially a river) side and I saw that there is a short distance (about 70 feet) across the water to the other side, this would be a short cut to get to the places to go 4x4’n without having to drive an unlicensed and insured vehicle on the streets of a town that is well known for the cops being, well uh, not nice, so anyway I decided we could just cross there because in the water about half way across was a guy standing in it and it was under waist high so off we went to cross the water and he gave us a thumbs up as we went by, the water was about under a foot higher then the floorboards, so we make it to the other side and come to find out it is an island and the water on the far side was WAY to deep so we turned around to cross back over but by now the guy was gone and I thought I knew where we crossed over at so back across we go but we were just west of where we were the first time and it was a tad bit deeper, so much deeper that the water was hitting me just at lap level and making a spray of water across over the shifter(s) and getting TR drenched and then all of a sudden one cylinder quit firing and the other was miss firing due to wet plug wires (of course) and it was just about to die when I thought to myself that this is not the place for it to die, if it did the current would take it down stream, you could tell it got very deep just a few feet to the side of us, just as I’m thinking that the other cylinder kicked back in and out we went, as we were coming up the bank a guy was standing by his camper watching the whole thing, looked at us shaking his head in disbelief.

From there we went to the camp ground grocery store to ask where the 4x4 trails were and the guy at the counter said to me “you do not want to cross the water or even put your tires in the water, it is an automatic $1,000.00 fine and you can not contest it.” He said some kid was out on a date and he pulled his truck up to the bank of the river to watch the water go by and make out when he got to close and the front tires slide down into the water and he couldn’t back out of it and so he called a tow truck to come pull him out, well the tow truck driver called the cops and they came and gave the kid a ticket, if the tow truck driver did not call and got caught pulling the truck out of the water the tow truck driver would have been fined $10,000.00!

So back to the story. We start heading towards the 4x4 trails and got about half way there when all of a sudden we heard a bad noise in the engine, kind of like a SNAP! and one of the cylinders went down, no power hardly at all, I could go down a hill but not pull up one. A couple guys in a Toyota Land Cruiser stopped to see if we needed help and to find out what the hell we were driving, one of them gave me a ride back to the camp site to get my truck and trailer to get the 10.

When I got home and found out the compression was way down in one of the cylinders I took the engine out and tore it down and found out that a ring caught the exhaust chamber and broke the ring in which it messed up the piston sleeve etc. I had found out by a guy in Pittsburg Kansas that has 2 LJ20’s where to get parts, so I called this place in NC and he (MR F____) said the best thing to do is send it to him and he would rebuild it. So I did. With it being in parts I was able to ship it to him via UPS in three different boxes.

A couple months had past and I didn’t hear a word from the guy rebuilding the engine so I contacted him, now the only way to do this is to fax him, he would not answer his phone, you would have to fax him to have him call you and if you were lucky he would but mostly he would just send you a fax back with one excuse or another. This went on for about 3 years. Then he wouldn’t even answer back at all. I tried and tried to find out his home address or home phone but with no luck. I would mail him letters to the address I sent the engine to, but no replies.

So now I decided I would have to put in a different engine, I found an Opel ( I think that’s what it was) with a V-4 engine in it and I was going to shoe-horn it in the 10, but about that time a guy offered me $300.00 for the LJ10 and the engine and since I needed money I sold it to him, he had it for a year and never did a thing with it then a flood came in 1993 and flooded the V-4 engine that he had laying on his shop floor, and so about 3 months after that I bought the LJ back for the same price I sold it.

Now I wanted MY original engine back so I had my brother contact Mr F____ who is a lawyer and with one registered letter my brother got a fax from a guy in NC saying that ‘Due to Mr F____ being in a very bad car wreck and unable to do any work’ and that he (the guy who wrote the fax) is going to take over the Suzuki shop and that he would make sure I would get back my engine soon, so after about 4 months I didn’t get my engine back I tried looking up the guy that signed the fax and sure enough I found a guy with that name listed in the phone book in that same town and so I called his house and he was so surprised that I was calling him, he wanted to know how I got his name, come to find out it was NOT him and that it was Mr F____ saying that it was this guy, this guy use to work with Mr F____ . So he said not to worry that he will get it all straightened out, he was PISSED! So two weeks later I received my engine all together and it ran pretty well for a while. He didn’t rebuild it, all he did was put new rings in it. BTW: Mr F___ was never in a car wreck. Just another lie.

The trucking company that brought me the engine back must have set something heavy on top of the metal crate that Mr F____ built to ship the engine in because it broke the weld on the crate and in turn broke the aluminum housing where the front shroud(s) bolt to, I had to get someone to weld the pieces back together, the rubber seal kept the pieces together except one small piece but the guy made a piece to fit and did a very good job. I have YET to get any money from the trucking company for the damages.

Oh yeah: Right after my brother sent him the registered letter I took two copy’s of the letter and faxed it to Mr F____, he had one of those fax machines that has the continuous roll of paper and so I sent one copy through and had the next one ready to go right behind it and just kept doing that until his roll of paper ran out and my fax machine gave me the error message. I bet I sent it through 50+ times.

I think he had my engine for over 6 years!

WOW! I could have made it a bit shorter but I wanted you to get the full story. Sorry so long. Heh
I'd rather be driving my LJ!
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lj50dude
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Post by lj50dude »

wow thats one hell of a story :shock:
Everyone has to believe in something, i believe i'll have another beer :beer:
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