1967 Jeepster Commando - The Kaiser Commando C-101

[SuperBuickGuy]

Wife loves those. Wanted one instead of the Wagoneers but are kinda rare out here.

a neighbor has one, looks about the same as Chris's only it was white originally.

[STINEY]

It needs some love for certain.

Advertised as a "trail rig", it seems to be fairly original. Some hackery, some seemingly good hackery, and some not so good hackery. The front axle area suffered from a "Lock-tite welder" and supposedly the front gears are out of it. Who knows, I take everything a PO says with a grain or two of salt.

PO says it runs, they drove it into its current spot, but that it won't start now.

Whatever. I am far more concerned with the body than the engine. I barely looked at the engine other than the anti-freeze (none to be seen) and the oil (little dirty but better than the oil in the Sport Coupe that my son recently bought this past winter). It was full and didn't sparkle, good enough.

Had a nice batch of hornets residing under the hood. PO was kind enough to provide a can of bug stiffener. Hope we got them all.

[SuperBuickGuy]

guard bees, my dad's cars are full of them.... it is kind of fun to watch someone march out to one of his cars and flop the door open with a "what's this.... OWWWW, GET THEM OFF,"

[SuperBuickGuy]

Now I understand - Stiney is building a chick magnet for his boys

https://jalopnik.com/one-man-one-dog-three-lovely-ladies-if-you-were-a-yo-1828573793

[STINEY]

Last week the Commando made some encouraging sounds - after running a wire straight to the points from the battery, pouring a little gas down the carb, and hitting the starter button hidden under the dash by a PO. Not much, but it tried, and there were no death rattles evident.

So yesterday we ran to a neighboring town and picked up a CJ7 Dana 30. Disc brakes, common parts, all the parts are there and no hackery - unlike the Dana 27 in the Commando.

Ever see a large nut welded to a steering arm to take the place of the tapered hole? No?

Okay, now picture the tie rod threaded end protruding through the hole in the large nut. And the threads of the tie-rod end WELDED to said nut.

Yeah. Dana 30 swap for so many reasons.

After unloading the 30, decided to putter with the Commando some more. It has an aluminum fuel tank, with a sump and a drain hole..............why not drain the stale fuel and get any moisture out of there at the same time, right?

4 GALLONS of water later............some fuel also came out.

MightyVac'd out the rest of the water laying in the sump, 5 gallons of fresh gas, syringe the carb bowl fuel of fuel..........and the starter switch hidden under the dash falls apart.

No problem. Yank the remains of the switch out from under the dash, jump the terminals with a handy pair of sidecuts.

After some coaxing, we have combustion on all 3 drivers side cylinders, and on the passenger side one cylinder is a trooper, another is thinking strongly about joining the chorus, and the third is a faint whisper.

And it actually was idling. Had to pull a the distributor wire to shut it down.

Good day. Even better that my youngest son shared all this with me. He's 13 now, and enjoyed the time together.

[SuperBuickGuy]

wow, and you even purchased most of the floor.

[DanStokes]

Don't pay SBG no nevermind - he's just jealous. So does it have a Buick V-6? IIRC, they liked the odd fire in those. Tough engine but a bit shaky at idle. But a 401 (either AMC or Buick) would be real nice sitting in there.

Dan

[silver_bullet]

that V6"s reliability and durability are the reasons why it was in production for so many years albeit in several versions.... Great find and best of luck on getting it started and sorted out!

[STINEY]

Aaron........have at it.

Yeah, I just found this. Door was open, so I cleaned around it. My 76 year-old mother stopped by to visit a spell, and that's when my 13 year old decided to try out the glovebox door. Surprise.

Heat gunning to follow. Cause nothing says hard-core off-roader like a sticker describing your, ummm, fellers.

[STINEY]

wow, and you even purchased most of the floor.

And there is even most of the floor under the mud, broken glass, and beer cans. You know its nasty when you have to stop to clean out your Shop Vac TWICE. Those hoses get heavy when slurping muck.

[SuperBuickGuy]

Don't pay SBG no nevermind - he's just jealous. So does it have a Buick V-6? IIRC, they liked the odd fire in those. Tough engine but a bit shaky at idle. But a 401 (either AMC or Buick) would be real nice sitting in there.

Dan

excuse me? Even Chris knows that finding a Jeep of that vintage with ANY floor is a score - even from a state that doesn't salt their roads.... sheesh, some people's children and their grandparents

[DanStokes]

excuse me? Even Chris knows that finding a Jeep of that vintage with ANY floor is a score - even from a state that doesn't salt their roads.... sheesh, some people's children and their grandparents

I AM their Grandparents!

Dan

[STINEY]

Installed a new fuel filter last evening. Figured the old one was saturated with water. It idled better.........not perfect yet, but definitely better.


I am becoming suspicious of the distributor cap. It looks very new, and has brass terminals, yet I suspect it may be an even-fire 225 cap and not an odd-fire cap. The distributor is the Delco and is the points setup, not HEI. I am familiar with the visual difference in the HEI's for the odd-fire, am not sure on the spacing of the points delco dizzy terminals.

Any of you seasoned Buick aficionados recall if there was a difference?
Did they even make a points distributor for the even-fire engines?
How did Delco account for the weird firing degrees?
Lobes on the distributor points cam were odd degrees too?

[STINEY]

Even Chris knows that finding a Jeep of that vintage with ANY floor is a score - even from a state that doesn't salt their roads.

The man speaks truth. Kaiser Jeep only made 57,350 of these things, and those were seemingly cast from liquified rust (a special trade secret of Jeep). Not many survived. They were only slightly less utilitarian than the CJs of the time, which did not endear them to the majority of drivers, so they quickly became fodder for those wanting a "field car". Then abuse in that realm soon showed the weak axles most of them had, and the fence rows and barnyards slowly dissolved them into the earth.

I watched one that was really a nice gently customized vehicle rot into nothing but flakes at my cousins house growing up. Sad. It merely had a broken axle.

[SuperBuickGuy]

that's a 225 not a 231 - so it's odd-fire

from the way back when Al Gore invented the internet
https://web.archive.org/web/20080415...h/engines/225/

neither odd or even fire 231 had points....

odd-fire caps have odd spacing between the terminals and you can easily and quickly tell by looking at the top of the cap (which, again, were all HEI)

a bit of history. GM made 2 decisions they later regretted. First was selling the 215 aluminum motor to the Brits (I think it was the best thing they ever did because that motor was problematic), and second was letting out the 225. When fuel crunch time came they needed the motors back - and GM couldn't convince British Leyland to let them have their motor back and GM would be darned before it put a Jeep motor in one of their vehicles. the 231 came about so they wouldn't be the same.... of course the 231 came at the height of the bean-counter-era so the differences between the 231 and 225 were mostly bad.