The Village Bicycle aka 1972 LJ10 build

350TacoZilla said:

I wonder how hard it would be to convert to LS style coil near plug and just use the distributor to mount the sensor. The distributor is actually stubbier than a samurai one but its the cap that really sticks out, even if you could find a cap where the wires come out from the side instead of straight out the top it would gain you some room.

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Yeah I’ve wondered about this but that’s all way above my knowledge base.

flexy flatty said:

These pics make me embarrassed about how messy my shop got so fast.

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I'd eat off that floor dude.

Quit cleaning and keep building!

A little update here, I’ve been picking away at this thing here and there. I’ve got the motor and tranny mounts done (no pics yet) and was pleased that the transmission just barely fits inside of the super narrow tunnel without modification. The main thing done is the rear axle which was a ****ing Rube Goldberg type situation due to my own negligence. I started out with a stock 83 rear housing intending to build a full floater off of it. I’d picked up these ruffstuff flanges for factory front spindles a while back which were bored for a 3inch axle tube.

The factory tubes were quite a bit smaller than that, and after contemplating the effort of turning an adapter sleeve to make the flange fit and also whether the super thin/small tube housing was up to the task of full floater duties, I decided to make life easy on myself and just buy an aftermarket housing with 3in tubes. Off to marketplace I went. After a bit of time searching I found what I thought would be the perfect candidate locally. I present to you the trail gear rock assault housing (this is where you can start laughing).


It’s an elocker model which was what I was hoping for and I’d made a deal on it before going to pick it up. When I got there I quickly remembered that this was the design that trail gear had filched from some dude on the old site a long time ago where the tubes are raised for clearance so the shafts don’t run down the centerline. This, of course, means that my full floater idea was now wholly impractical. I’d already made the deal and it was my oversight so I still bought it from the guy. Now the brainstorming begins. I’d considered just tossing out the idea of full float and making it semi which would have worked fine but frankly I wanted it to be cooler so I got to measuring everything with my calipers and drew up a pair of adapter flanges in AutoCAD.

I uploaded the drawing to send cut send late thursday night and had a pair of them cut out of 1/2in on my doorstep Monday when I got home. It was probably unnecessary but I clamped the new flange to the ruffstuff flange and through tapped it in phase so that the spindle bolts would hold everything together for welding and just all around redundancy.

Here they are bolted together showing the offset hole for the axle tube on the new flange.

Next it was time to cut the housing to the right length and offset.

And here is a cross section of the factory flange showing how off center the tubes are.

Housing cut to length.

Alignment bar installed 🙄

Tacked.

Fully welded.

And with the hubs, factory front solid axle brakes, and locking hubs installed (I upgraded the front brakes to ifs calipers and fj60 rotors and reused the old stuff for the rear). I drilled and tapped the hubs for 7/16 arp 12pt bolts to replace the studs and cone washers. This is the same setup I have had on my Land Cruiser for a decade and it makes life so much easier when it’s time to disassemble, plus they can be torqued to 70ft-lb instead of the factory 20. I check them regularly on the trail and have never had one be loose.

I’ll likely not use the locking hubs unless people think they’d be up to the task. It would make it nice for flat towing and I have the chromolly gears for them but I don’t want to be blowing them up constantly. Not shown in the photo is the new flange fully welded to the full float adapter, it shouldn’t go anywhere. Also, the calipers are supposed to be rotated 90 degrees but my drawing wasn’t perfect and the flanges ended up fitting best in this position with the alignment bar so I’ll just have to be a little more conscientious when I’m bleeding the brakes, otherwise I don’t think it’s too big of a deal. I’ve got ubolts on order and some spring perches to weld on when I’m ready to set pinion angle. Besides this both axles are done save for needing to order custom shafts, I’m in no rush to do that yet. That housing made the project into a giant abortion and I probably should have been honest with the guy and bailed on the deal but I hate to go back on an agreement and I think the whole project turned out ok in the end.

So currently I’m trying to figure out the transfer case mounting. It’s obvious once I’ve gotten in there that the zor snatch is not going to work, the LJ frame is just way too narrow. It looks like I’m going to have to come up with my own custom mount. I know nothing of samurai cases and earlier in the thread a spine was recommended to help hold the thing together with the 6.5 gears, since I’m starting from scratch what reinforcements and supports should I incorporate? The case itself will just barely fit within the “passenger” frame rail so the mount will have to be creative but I’d like to make sure the case is as robust as possible. Here’s a fun comparison of the factory transfer case vs the samurai case.

Good to see this updated man. Not much to add to your build but love seeing these little things lol. I always thought the samurai case was small, that LJ case would fit in a lunchbox geez

Look at the low range eos cradle and just copy that as much as you can.

In reality, this thing is so tiny and light, you'll probably not hurt it.

Awesome!

SKULLYOTA you're supposed to tell him how useless it is before offering to buy it, not tell him to keep it then offer.

YotaAtieToo said:

Look at the low range eos cradle and just copy that as much as you can.

In reality, this thing is so tiny and light, you'll probably not hurt it.

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Ya I think I might just get a no name spine and then build off of that

350TacoZilla said:

SKULLYOTA you're supposed to tell him how useless it is before offering to buy it, not tell him to keep it then offer.

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SKULLYOTA said:

I always thought the LJ case would make a great doubler since the rock block was discontinued. Definitely save it. How much you want for it?

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SKULLYOTA said:

Oh yeah silly me

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Ha! You have me thinking now…

It would even let me keep the factory parking brake. In reality I think it would be impractical for a street driven rig because the high range of the LJ case is around 1.7:1 so compounding that with the underdrive high range of the samurai case would make the final drive too low. I’d def sell it to you for pretty cheap if you can really use it. If not I’ll toss it on the shelf for the next decade like everything else I own.

Hate to bug you but any progress on this thing? I keep thinking about this everytime I walk past my G10T sitting in the garage waiting for a project.

Could you transfer the drum onto the Samurai case? I've never been around the LJ stuff so don't know how similar or different it all is.

Sorry, missed this bump. I’ve got some progress I’ll post up, been busy working on some much needed maintenance on my 280k mile DD Tacoma and different house projects. I was actually going to investigate putting that drum on the samurai case, might work with a simple redrill. I’ll get some pics up this week. I pulled the tub to have better access to things so I’m going to try to get some decent progress done. I have a good friend who is going to be unemployed in April (the good kind of unemployed ie Silicon Valley buyout not the bad kind) so I want to have it a solid roller by then because he offered to take the lead on wiring and plumbing it during his time off. It needs to be able to be flat towed to Santa Cruz by then, it’s strong motivation to get stuff handled. Now for my noob question of the month… before I set the rear pinion angle and weld on the perches, what are everyone’s thoughts on a HP 8” holding up in the rear of this thing with a load bolt? My gut says that’s pushing it but with the reduced high range from the 6.5 case gears I’m thinking I might get away with 4.10s in the diffs which would be a stronger gear set plus the load bolt plus lightweight and low power. I don’t know, just thinking outloud.

I mean plenty of samurai's get away with stock axles for quite awhile with just transfercase gear change and 33-35. It's mainly going to come down to how hard you wheel it and how heavy your foot is if things get bound up.

Good to hear you have some progress.

That thing will probably be under 1500lbs. Honestly I think you are overbuilding the axles already.

I really like this build. You are doing a great job. I wanted an LJ a guy had here locally but ended up getting an SJ410 instead. That LJ changed hands a few times in the past few years and I dont even know if it’s around here anymore. I have not seen it.

KungFooMASTA said:

That thing will probably be under 1500lbs. Honestly I think you are overbuilding the axles already.

I really like this build. You are doing a great job. I wanted an LJ a guy had here locally but ended up getting an SJ410 instead. That LJ changed hands a few times in the past few years and I dont even know if it’s around here anymore. I have not seen it.

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I’m thinking somewhere around 2200 ready to roll but if it comes in lighter than that I’d be pretty happy. Really anything under 2500 is cool with me, then I can haul it with my 4 banger taco on my utility trailer.