1991Jeep_Man

I've had threads on here before trying to find my low oil pressure issue in my '91 XJ with 205K miles. After some testing and common sense (the first oil change I did when I bought her yielded very black oil and was about 1 1/2 qts low) I have determined the issue lies in the bearings being worn. So, with this being my restoration project, I was thinking about doing 1 of 3 things:

1) [Hopefully] Find a low miles well-kept used engine, clean it up, and toss it in.

2) Take my engine out, disassemble it, have the head, block, crank, and rods machined and install new pistons and what not and rebuild my current engine.

3) Buy a reman

Where do you guys think I should go? Also, I am also thinking that JUST MAYBE my low pressure issue could be a sludge related problem. First off, the drop in pressure I had seemed like it occured LITERALLY overnight. One day, great pressure (25ish hot idle, 40 at 2000 and rises with rpm), next day BAM low pressure (18-20 hot idle, 33-35 seems to be the max I can get at hot accel, even at 2500+ rpm). Well, I checked my oil a few days ago and saw I was about 1/2-3/4 qt low (still in safe) and added a bottle of MMO. I have steadily seen my COLD oil pressure increase (I had went from about 60psi cold idle down to 40ish, but it has started to rise to the point the other day I had 45-50 psi cold idle). But still lower hot pressure. I have replaced my sending unit. Any opinions and ideas are much appreciated. Thanks for any help in advance!

crystalion

Hows your wallet $$$$. Personally I like to pull the original and do EVERYTHING. This way you get to put in what you want-make it beefier at the same time. BUT this will depend on the condition of the parts taken out of the engine. Sometimes the block-crank-whatever is just to far gone . It also lets you NOT have the problems associated with swaps.

1991Jeep_Man

Whatever the budget ends up being is however much I can save up. This is gonna be a 'down the road' restoration. I'm hopefully going to manage to keep the pressure managable with a fresh oil change and a bottle of Lucas. I don't like band-aids, but I can't just let the ol' girl sit doing nothing but rust.