1960 Willys Utility Wagon - Be Careful of Big Ideas!

I've been a member of this forum for a couple of years but never got around to posting anything. I always enjoy the many interesting posts and following your build threads. I finally decided to start a thread about my project that has been ongoing for several years and has gotten out of control. I owned my wagon since 1977 but just started this recent work in 2006. Looking back, I realize that I didn't take enough photos, have a clear plan, have enough time, or keep good records. It was hard to go back to the beginning so this is my best shot.

HOW IT STARTED

My dad worked as a mechanic at a dealership in Eagle River, Wisconsin, so I was around Willys and Jeeps during the fifties and sixties. It was my brother-in-law, who drove a ’48 wagon, who influenced me to finally buy one of my own.

I bought my Willys in Vacaville, California, sometime during the summer of 1977. The wagon was my daily driver for about the next ten years and I have some very fond memories associated it. Eventually, life got in the way and it spent many years being moved from one storage location to another. Today, it’s still hard to believe that it never got sold or simply lost in the shuffle. Finally, around 1999, my life and job situation changed to the point where it had become possible to consider driving it again. But, before putting it back on the road, I wanted to improve its looks and performance.

The body was rust-free and in good condition but the interior was pretty rough. There was no head liner, the body panels were water stained and the upholstery was coming apart. The engine ran well but, by design, suffered from poor performance when the vehicle was used in any manner other than off-road.
One idea was to restore the vehicle; meaning that when finished it would look just as it did when purchased from the dealer’s showroom. As appealing as that idea was, there were some performance limitations that lead me to consider other alternatives. Since I intended to use the vehicle as my daily driver, acceleration, braking, cornering, steering and noise are the biggest of those issues. I came up with the following four project goals:

1. Maintain the vehicle’s original appearance.
2. Improve handling and performance
3. Hide or disguise modifications.
4. Keep visible modifications period-correct.

I knew that it was not possible to expect perfect adherence to these goals but keeping them at the forefront of my decisions would minimize unwanted deviation from vehicle originality. What I didn't know was the result of those goals in terms of time and cost.

The photo that has a turquoise colored wagon in the background was taken at Willys America in November, 2001, and is pretty much how it looks when I bought. The other photos were taken about two years ago at my house in Maryland.

I'll do my best to continue with regular updates to cover the past eight years of work.

It's good to be here - thanks!

Beautiful little beast, isn't she. I can't wait for a good story. Man, she sits up proud.

Looking forward to your updates Bill.

Pete

Hey Bill. Glad you started documenting your Wagon's progress! It's never too late to start. Nice job. Keep it coming! Pivnic

Hi Bill,

Nice wagon! I look forward to more pics...and I used to live up the road from Vacaville in Davis - although not until 1992.

Cheers,


Scramboleer AKA Dan

What a great start! Looking forward to seeing it return to a daily driver refurb. Glad you didn't sell it in the in between.

Be great to follow along with the build history.

Nice looking wagon and good story along with it. I think many of us has sold a favorite project and then regretted it later, its inspirational to hear that you kept it all those years and have "re-discovered" it.

One treasure you have there!

J

Great work !!! Congratulations


Enviado desde mi iPhone utilizando Tapatalk

Thanks for the comments and encouragement. Still trying to figure out how to use the forum - I hope that replying to my own thread is how to continue the thread.

Before getting into more details I feel that I need to explain a couple of things. This project has at least four main parts - the engine, rest of the drive train, body, and interior. The engine spent six years being built in Indianapolis. I spent some of that time on the engine but most of my time was dedicated to the other stuff. In the past eight years, I have spent about 7,000 hours on this project. Sometimes I wonder how that can be possible. Many things I didn't know so I had to learn them, some things I didn't like so redid them until I did. It all adds up. By far, the single biggest task was the engine work.

I wanted to keep things as original as possible so keeping the Super Hurricane was very important. I feel that the engine is a vehicle,s DNA, once it is gone it is simply a host for another power plant. Unfortunately, how I wanted to drive my wagon couldn't be done with the original engine but at the same time it had to stay. The following is something I wrote about ten years ago and it is what has led to the engine work that I will start to talk about next time.

"Recently, I overheard someone asking a question about replacing the F4-134 in his 1952 pickup. I began to wonder what it would take for most of us to leave the stock engine in place. The usual reason that I hear when asking why the engine was replaced is that it did not have enough power. I agree that the L4-134 Go Devil, L6-148 Lightning, F4-134 Hurricane, L6-161 Lightning, F6-161 Hurricane, L6-226 Super Hurricane or the 6-230 Tornado are not high performance engines, or even considered to be of moderate performance.

My understanding is that any engine producing more that 1.0 HP per cubic inch is considered to be high performance. The stock Willys engines are rated at about 0.5 HP per cubic inch. The road from 0.5 to 1.0 and beyond is not a straight one - it takes an ever increasing effort to get incremental gains of equal size the further one goes down the road.

According to Motor Auto Repair Manual, Sixteenth Edition, Third Printing, 1981:

• The L4-134 develops 106 lb-ft of torque at 2,000 RPM with a 63 HP peak at 4,000 RPM (0.47 HP per cubic inch).
• The L6-148 develops 117 lb-ft of torque at 2,000 RPM with a 70 HP peak at 4,000 RPM (0.47 HP per cubic inch).
• The F4-134 develops 114 lb-ft of torque at 2,000 RPM with a 72 HP peak at 4,000 RPM (0.54 HP per cubic inch).
• The L6-161 develops 117 lb-ft of torque at 1,600 RPM with a 75 HP peak at 4,000 RPM (0.47 HP per cubic inch).
• The F6-161 develops 135 lb-ft of torque at 2,000 RPM with a 90 HP peak at 4,200 RPM (0.56 HP per cubic inch).
• The L6-226 develops 190 lb-ft of torque at 1,400 RPM with a 105 HP peak at 3,600 RPM (0.46 HP per cubic inch).
• The 6-230 develops 210 lb-ft of torque at 1,750 RPM with a 140 HP peak at 4,000 RPM (0.61 HP per cubic inch).

The 226 in my 1960 wagon performs well when the vehicle is driven as designed. However, when I am on the highway traveling at about 55 to 60 mph and want to accelerate to 70 mph, I had better have about 10 miles of straight road, with the wind behind me and preferably going down a hill.

For me to keep my original Super Hurricane it would have to develop 400 lb-ft of torque at about 4,000 RPM with a 300 HP peak at about 5,000 RPM. A nice flat torque curve between two and four thousand RPM would be nice too."

So, what would it take for you to leave (or to have left) your stock engine in place?

The Engine

I decided to find a donor engine so that I could reinstall the original if desired. These photos show the original engine and the donor. The original is in storage.



The donor came from a 1959 Utility Wagon in Iowa. That 1959 wagon also gave up its Koenig winch and power takeoff.
To address engine performance issues, the easiest decision would have been replace the engine with one that already meets the desired criteria. Since that would have resulted in the single biggest deviation from originality, I had to figure out what could be done with the original Continental, in-line six cylinder flat head engine. I came up with two engine performance goals:

I had no idea where those goals would lead to in terms of time, cost and additional modifications.

The engine would require extensive modification to reach the 300 hp goal. Those modifications would fall into one or more of the following three general categories:


Some of the work performed in the above categories had a trickle-down effect that led to additional work in other areas of the powertrain, chassis and body.
The donor engine was disassembled, cleaned, and inspected for its suitability to be used in this project. The cylinder block, head, crankshaft and camshaft were determined to be of usable quality. Other than the distributor, water pump and oil pump, most of the remaining parts would not be reused.

following closely.

Increased displacement – stroker crankshaft design

A cost-driven decision was made to weld and off-set grind the stock 1035 forged steel crankshaft rather than use a 4340 billet crankshaft. Although a 4340 billet crankshaft would be stronger, I decided that the OEM forged crank would meet this engine’s performance requirements.

The Continental uses rods that have the beam off-set from the journal centerline by about 0.125 inch (Photo at right). That design was a show-stopper with regard to having rods made due to cost. The crankshaft journal centerlines had to be moved. Since the stock journals were 1.313” wide, new journal centerlines could be established by using rods with a narrower big end. Doing that required precision measurements to establish the cylinder bore centerlines and their relationship to the crankshaft cheeks and main bearing webs.

The photo below shows the block in a DRO equipped Bridgeport (machined intake flange against a pair of cylindrical stops for alignment), and using a dial center indicator and edge finders to get the cylinder centerlines and the position of the main bearing webs relative to them.


The centerline of the number one cylinder is used as the reference (X=0). The next step was to put the bearing shells in the main saddles (including the thrust bearing) and lay the crank in the block. The DRO keeps constant track of the position in X & Y while the edge finder locates the crank cheeks and thrust flange. The purpose here is to find a reference that the crank welder/grinder can use to put the new rod journals where they belong.

The new journals will take a location based on something measurable that the crank grinder can find, in this case the lathe-turned surface of the sides of the crank cheeks. This is not a high tolerance surface (within +/- 0.014”) but it suffices to provide a reference to where the journals nominally belong. The crank grinder will be able to touch off on a face and work to an indicator. The next image shows the results of that mapping exercise.









Oil holes were another issue, the straight shot from the main journal was somewhat centered in the OEM (1.313 wide) rod journal. Inspection showed the crank wasn't drilled precisely when made. The narrowed rod journals and new location of their centerlines necessitated the crank cheeks being marked radially for location prior to welding, and the oil passages re-drilled after the journals were resized, to a location based on those pre-welding marks, but centered in the journal.

The new journals will be 0.870”, plus 0.006” clearance on each side, for a nominal width of 0.882” compared to the current 1.313 inch. Slightly greater clearances provide a more accurate metering of hydrodynamic bearing outflow, which is a function of radial clearance and side clearances. Lubricating the camshaft and cylinder walls through metered outflow is a superior methodology to the antique drilled pin-hole passage, which can reduce load bearing capacity of the hydrodynamic bearing.

Looks nice as she is.

Increased displacement – stroke length

Big displacement gains can be made my increasing stoke length but there are trade-offs to consider. A longer stroke means higher piston speeds for a given engine speed, resulting in greater friction and inertial loads. It also becomes difficult to manage the rod to stroke ratio. I’ll talk about this more in the rod section.

Now that the rod journal centerlines were established, the stroke increase, needed to be determined. The longer stroke crankshaft and the rods must be able to rotate in the block without running into the crankcase sides, bottom of the cylinders, oil pan rail, oil pan, main bearing webs, or the camshaft. To do that, a connecting rod needed to swung to determine the available space for increasing the stoke
length.

I decided to try for the longest practical stroke length then deal with the resulting design issues as they presented themselves. The longest practical stroke length would be determined by interference with existing block geometry.

The two photos below show the fixture used for this operation. A partial crankshaft section is clamped into one of the main bearing journals. The connecting rod is installed on to a dummy rod journal, connected with an adjustable length web. The assembly is rotated, increasing the throw until interference is encountered.

You can see that an original connecting rod is used for this operation. That means that, since the beam center-line is offset 1/8”, the contact point for the new rods will be 1/8” fore or aft of where these rods contact the block (three are offset to the front and three are offset to the rear). After the new connecting rods are received, the clearance will be rechecked. That operation is discussed in the rechecking rod clearance section.

The goal is to clearance the block until the rod contacted the oil pan rail. The rods hit the bottom of the cylinder bores on both sides. The block had to be relieved at the bottom of the bores to provide clearance to swing the rods.

The first cylinder had to be done by hand grinding, to remove a minimum possible amount of material at the bottom of the bores. This was a very delicate task as the bottom of the cylinder bore to lower inner deck interface cannot be seen (and there's water jacket on the other side). It took several iterations of careful hand grinding to clear the rods with a minimum of material removal, some with the crank closer to BDC, others with the crank nearer TDC, working from both sides to the middle to determine the minimum amount of chamfer or notch that must be cut. Both sides of the number one cylinder were done by hand in this fashion until rod finally swung clear. Only the first cylinder needed to be done by hand grinding, to establish the shape of the chamfer.




























After clearancing the first cylinder by hand a Bridgeport was used to machine the remaining five cylinders. The block was placed against dowel pins in the mill to line it up on "Y" axis. A tapered reamer was selected that would most accurately reproduce the hand-ground shape. The reamer, mounted at an angle, was moved towards the hand ground cut until it just removed the blue layout dye painted on the hand ground chamfers. That “Y” dimension was recorded on the DRO and used as a reference to clearance machine the remaining cylinder bores on that side of the block. The block was reversed in the mill to do the opposite sides. The photo at the right shows the tapered reamer used for this operation.

Maximum crankshaft throw was achieved when the big end of the connecting rod hit the oil pan rails. That was at 0.213” over the stock throw length. Because throw is one-half the stroke, that means the stoke was increased by 0.415 inch; changing the original 4.375” stoke to 4.800 inches.

However, at that point, the rods did contact the sides of the oil pan. So rather than shorten the stroke to clear the pan, six blisters (Figure 12) were added to each side of the oil pan to provide the necessary clearance. There was no interference with the camshaft.

I'll talk about those two bungs welded to the front of the oil pan sump when I get to the full-flow oil conversion section.


.

Inspiring work sir! At some point I hope you can reveal cost/costs just so I don't feel bad at ditching my 226 for a SBC.
Clearly a labor of love on your part. It never occurred to me there was more to squeeze from the Continental Red Seal then the Super Hurricane already achieved. I look forward to hearing what rpm's the pistons will be moving with the stroke at nearly 5"! What do you figure displacement will be up too now?

Oh, and if work takes me to MD (are you anywhere near Andrews AFB?) the beers are on me if you'll show and tell your project! :cheers:

David - I've kept track of the cost but not sure if I would ever share the details because it is so over the top.

The engine's design red-line is based on a maximum average piston speed of 4,000 feet per minute - with a 4.800" stoke that is reached at 5,000 rpm. Above that piston speed, even with the superchargers, the volumetric efficiency will decrease rapidly due to the port flow approaching sonic velocity.

It would be nice to be able to put together a couple of performance packages based on this work so that some people would at least reconsider an engine swap. It will never be inexpensive but perhaps at least reasonable since a lot of the engineering and design work is already finished.

I live in Potomac, just west of the District of Columbia, so not very far from Andrew's - let me know if you are ever in the area - a visit would be great.

I am familiar with Colorado State University so know where you are - beautiful country and a get place to own a vintage 4x4.

Thanks,
Bill

Increased displacement – stroker crankshaft welding & grinding

Now that the journal centers and stroke length were established, the crankshaft could finally be sent out for welding and grinding. This would be an iterative process. The grinder would only perform a roughing operation on the connecting rod journals but precision grind the web cheeks. The as-found cheeks were not a high tolerance surface (within +/- 0.014”) but it sufficed to provide a reference for nominal journal locations.

The next step involved indicating the block in to the mill using the center of the two end bores then installing the roughed out crankshaft. The intake/exhaust flange is not perfectly parallel to the longitudinal centerline of the bores; hence the bores had to be brought in iteratively, in a time consuming indicating operation. The locations changed a bit, based on using the bottom of the bores (since the block is upside down). For this operation, the bores were aligned in the Y-axis.

With the crank back in the block, each of the precision ground cheeks was mapped to the centerline of its respective bore. The goal was to center the new journals as precisely as possible to the actual centerlines of the bores at the bottom. Since the crank grinder had no X-axis measurement capability, it was necessary to provide an actual number from each cheek to the edge of the new journal. The crank grinder used a magnetic base dial indicator to touch off on the cheek to locate the journal centerlines.

The sketch at the right shows the final crankshaft specifications provided for the grinding operation. Each of the cheek offsets is slightly different due to inherent manufacturing tolerances and that half were measured from the front, and half from the back. That was necessary due to the cheek placement. It's the only way the crank grinder was able locate the journals with his equipment. The troublesome original "offset" rod bearings are now eliminated and the rod bottom end is more streamlined, and lighter.

After preliminary grinding, the crank was returned to re-drill and chamfer the oil holes, and then returned to the grinder for final journal sizing and polishing. Upon completion of final journal sizing and polishing, the stroke came out 4.800”, very close to specified 4.813 inches. Crank welding is not an exact operation, one must estimate how much weld to apply, and final stroke only comes out after grinding. Final journal width came in at 0.900” and the journal radius at 0.100 inch.

The crankshaft was now finished, but several more tasks associated with, cylinder bore diameter, connecting rods, pistons, main caps, camshaft, tappets and valves needed completion before it could before crankshaft installation and cylinder boring. The rotating assembly was carefully checked for interferences after final installation, but none were found.

This second photo shows the crankshaft after it was returned after preliminary grinding. The photo shows very clearly how the connecting rod journal were narrowed to move the connecting rod beam centerline 1/8” to the same centerline established by the cylinder bore.








.

Connecting rods

The big end dimensions were established from the crankshaft and the small end was matched to a common wrist pin diameter. That left the rod length as the last unknown. This is where experienced engine building was needed.

Offset grinding the crankshaft increased the throw by 0.213 inches so that meant the original piston, on an original rod, would travel 0.213” farther up the cylinder. In this case, the piston with protrude above the block deck about 1/16 inch. To achieve the design goal of zero piston deck height either the rod length or piston compression had to be changed – both involved making compromises to the ‘ideal’ engine design.

One design criterion is the relationship between the rod length and the stroke. There is no lack of discussion and test data regarding rod length to stroke (R/S) ratio. Much of the literature recommends a R/S ratio of 1.550:1 or higher as being necessary to minimize fiction due to the side loading force on the thrust side of the piston.
The original R/S ratio is 1.600:1 (7.000/4.375). Since the stroke is already fixed, only the rod length can be used to manage the R/S ratio. To keep the original R/S ratio with the increased stroke requires the rod length to increase to 7.680 inches (1.600 x 4.800).

The next design criterion is piston compression height – the distance from the wrist pin centerline to the top of the piston. Recommendations put the minimum piston compression height at about 1.250 inches. The original piston uses a 3-17/32” tall piston with a compression height of 1.980 inches.

As compression height gets shorter the piston tends to rock more in the cylinder bore because it doesn’t have as much support as does a longer piston. A longer piston also transfers more heat. In our case trying to maintain the original 1.6:1 R/S ratio means using a piston compression height of 1.300 inches – right at the recommended minimum. Heat transfer through the piston is a desirable design feature so using a piston that short was not considered as an option.

After considering all options, and deciding to optimize piston height rather than R/S ratio led to specifying a 7” rod length for the modified engine. Setting the piston deck height at zero established the new piston’s compression height of 1.850 inches.

The R/S ratio is now 1.458:1 (7.000/4.8) – below what many would consider the minimum. Rod length, and R/S ratio, are critical in terms of gas column velocity, and determine the number of degrees the piston remains close to TDC during the firing stroke. With forced induction, the rod ratio diminishes in significance, because we are not restricted by the physics of gas column behavior as in a normally aspirated condition.

In order to make this engine perform as desired, we had to get the most mass airflow (pounds per unit time) possible, at structurally supportable RPM levels. By using forced induction we could overcome inherent design limitations such as lack of valve and port area; long combustion chamber; and its relatively small bore versus stroke.
This engine’s design goals dictated getting the largest possible displacement through boring and stroking then trying to optimize the rest of package within those limits. Larger displacement will move more air at lower RPM's than small displacement.

The photo at the right shows an original connecting rod next to the modified engine’s rod. They are the same length but the angle of the new 4340 rod is different so it looks shorter. The new rod is much larger to support sustained operation at 5,000 rpm.

I can’t find the rod and piston information with regard to the manufacturer – when or if I do I’ll update this page.

The table below compares the original versus the modified piston and rod assembly component weights. The new assembly weighs almost one pound less than the original assembly. I’m not sure how to put a number on it but lighter is better with regard to stress on the crankshaft.



The figure below shows the piston, connecting rod and crankshaft arrangement for the original Continental engine
on the left and the bored and stroked version on the right.