In 2022 my Grandpa gave me the first car he had ever bought new: A 1985 Jeep Cherokee Chief.
I have not, and will not by a new car. But my first car, which I own to this day was a 1991 Chevy Camaro RS which my teenage self dubbed "Crapmaro".
This is a build thread of course, but I also feel like the story is very central to the car and the build so far, so I've laid out the back story below as well for anyone who might care.
The Prologue:
In 1985 my Grandpa bought the car in Lancaster, California, and in California it stayed for most of it's life. It was really barebones overall, with manual everything and the base 2.5l engine. The only notable thing would be the factory A/C, but I guess that's kind of a necessity in the Mojave desert. Over the years he put over 100k miles on it with little issue travelling all across the west coast, I even found a vintage map of Las Vegas in the door, which is definitely getting framed. I'm not entirely sure how the car ended up how it did when I got it, my family has given me varying stories of how it went, but this is my basic understanding: In the early 90s my Grandma overheated the engine in some flood water and the car was towed and sat in the farthest corner of my Grandparents property until 2001 when my Dad and Grandpa got it to run for a bit by replacing a cracked manifold and the ICM, but it did eventually die again within minutes and it sat there for 2 decades.
Reviving the 2.5:
It wasn't until 2023 that we brought the car from SoCal to Washington state. It wasn't until 2025 that I got the car running.
Long story short: Up until 2025 I had a lot of mental struggles (not that I'm the picture of mental stability now) and often used "I have to work on the Jeep" as an excuse to not break out of my shell and go out to actually experience life beyond work and sitting behind screens. Once I realized that the Jeep my Grandpa had gifted me in hopes that I would fix it up and make it my own had become an excuse to not better myself, and that the only way things would ever get better is if I made them better myself, I got to work.
In 2024 the biggest things that happened were the engine being removed, resurfaced, and resealed. The fuel pump and ICM were replaced multiple times, the fuel pump itself was eventually just removed and replaced with an electric one. The clutch was also replaced while the engine was out. To be honest, most of that was either done by my Dad or done by myself after being pestered to get off my lazy *** by my Dad.
2025 is where the big things happened. As mentioned, I went through a lot of character development in 2025, and the Jeep was central to a lot of it. By March I had rebuilt and frankensteined 3 Chinese weber carbs into one Frankencarb which actually worked fairly well. It ran rough and rich but it ran well enough to drive, but there were 2 issues: I couldn't drive stick and had nobody to teach me as my Dad was out of town, and all the fluids in the car aside from brake fluid were older than I was. So on April 26th I spent all day, and well into the morning of the 27th, replacing seals and fluids throughout the drivetrain. At 9:12 AM on April 27th the car moved under it's own power for the first time in over 2 decades. Admittedly I did stall it leaving the driveway. I didn't expect reverse to be so quick and so I instinctively slammed the brakes without pushing the clutch in first. Woops. But I quickly grasped driving stick on my own and took it for a few spins around the neighborhood, much to my neighbors dismay.
Going into May I noticed the steering box leaked, so that was replaced and all seemed well. I drove it to work a couple times and it seemed fine. Slow, but fine. Until May 10th when as I reached a roundabout I heard a loud pop and the engine died. I pulled off to the side of the road and popped the hood to find steam blowing out from the radiator and cylinder head. To be honest this was the first point where I genuinely considered getting rid of the car. All that effort went to waste. Even after replacing both the cylinder head and gasket, it just didn't wanna run right. At this point I was almost 1000 dollars into just fixing this engine and I didn't want to dump another cent into it. Of course the general consensus on engine swaps in these is to yank out the old 2.5 and throw in a 4.0, but the 4.0 won't fit into a pre-87 model without molesting the firewall, which I didn't wanna do. I was stuck.
But as mentioned earlier, I own a 1991 Camaro RS. This car had been my daily, but I also wanted to make it faster whenever I could. I was in a bunch of buy/sell/trade groups and one day while mindlessly scrolling one, I saw someone close to me had listed a 3.1 V6 out of a 1991 Camaro RS for 50 bucks. He claimed it had 96k miles, and he was only getting rid of it because of a timing issue and it was a V6 from a Camaro. Who wants a Camaro V6? I sure as hell did. The 3.1 V6 is externally similar to the 2.8 that the early Cherokees had, just with improvements to internals to improve reliability. This looked like the best option to get the Jeep going again, and so the next Saturday the engine was mine, wiring harness and all.
3.1 Swap:
I was under the impression it would be somewhat straightforward. It wasn't.
The timing issue was the first thing to figure out and it took all of 2 seconds to notice that distributor head and distributor shaft seemed to be in the middle of a rough divorce. 1 day and a thing of JB weld later and that was solved. After that I replaced the gaskets, took off the smog pump because who needs that? and got to work on yanking the 2.5 out of the Jeep.
A day later, the 2.5 was out and the 3.1 was... there... The first hurdle was motor mounts. The 3.1 mounts did not fit at all, despite what I had read online. Thankfully, the local junkyard just happened to get a 1985 Cherokee Chief with the 2.8 in the same day. What luck, right? Side note: This 2.8 Cherokee had over 300k miles on it. Crazy. The 2.8 motor mounts bolted right up to the 3.1 and right into the Jeep itself. Now it was time to actually get the thing running.
Wiring, somehow, was the simplest part. I chopped out the old stuff, except for the important old stuff, and connected that to the important new stuff. Basically I spliced everything from the Camaro harness into the appropriate circuit from the ignition switch and called it a day. I ran bus bars for the bigger circuits (always-hot and hot-in-run) to clean things up and got to work on the rest of it.
Fuel was also fairly simple. I took the electric in-tank pump from a 93 Cherokee and dropped it in. Then routed the fuel pump wire from the ECU to the fuel tank and spliced on the other side of the 93 fuel pump harness. The pump is actually just the perfect strength for this application, luckily enough. The downside is that 93 is when Chrysler decided to switch **** around so now my fuel gauge reads in reverse...
Exhaust is a headache to this day. Y-pipes for these engines are hard to find in junkyards and impossible to find online. The best match I found was from an 84 S10, but being the 2wd model the driver side downpipe hits the front driveshaft. It also does not have the bung for an O2 sensor, so this engine has ran rich from day 1. Ideally, I'll eventually get a y-pipe from an 86+ 4WD S10 or, even better, an actual 2.8 Cherokee. Otherwise, the y-pipe was a near perfect fit and I just had to weld up a dog-leg shaped pipe to get it to fit up to the old catback.
Sensors were also very "fun". Most of the harness was labeled, but some wasn't. Thankfully the harness was very similar to my own Camaros harness, and most of the old sensors ended up working. Sometimes GM money grubbing tactics are a good thing.
Finally we get to cooling. I took a 2 speed fan from a Ford Taurus, and coolant hoses from a Ford Explorer so I could use the stock radiator (don't ask how long it took me to find out which hoses did and didn't work). At this point I realized that the coolant temp sensor and fan relay didn't work, and neither did the family truck I had been taking to work since my Camaro was also non-op. With about an hour before I had to be to work and the Jeep being the only running car available, I frankensteined together a manual fan switch using the old engine harness. It made it to work and back just fine, and thus the swap was "complete".
The Crapmarokee:
I don't usually name cars, but my family does. When pressed to name my first ever project car, a 1984 Camaro Z28 in that classic 80s brown, I just said "Fine, Crapmaro" and that has since been the title of every Camaro I've had up until my first actual running and legally owned one. Given that the Jeep now has an engine from a third gen Camaro, I figured Crapmarokee would be a very fitting name. My friends have come up with some other clever names like "Jeepenstein" and "That piece of ****".
This car has been a blast. I've already made many fond memories working on it and doing things with friends in it and it's only been a few months of driving it. I have a lot of plans, so hopefully I'll remember to update this thread as I update the car!
My first upgrade so far is the fuel system. I'm still using the 93' fuel pump assembly and I have yet to reverse the polarity of the sending unit wires to fix the fuel gauge reading backward. It took a while to get the car to idle properly, turns out the issue was timing and I was an idiot, but during the process of elimination I bought a set of injectors from South Bay Fuel Injectors that really woke the motor up and did smooth the idle quite a bit even with really off timing.
At some point after fixing the return line in the engine bay started leaking. It was a rush job getting those lines ran so I was prepared for this to happen and already had all the parts I needed to go from rubber lines to AN lines. Allstar Performance made adapters from the TPI style fuel rail to 6AN, which made things super easy. I went from those to a 45 degree fitting for each line and then used a 1/4 hardline adapter on the feedline where it comes out of the transmission tunnel and a 5/16 hardline adapter on the return.
Each of these really increased the power and throttle response of the engine, so even though they cost like 6x what the engine itself did I think it was well worth it.
I forgot to include in the original post, but most of the gauges work. I think I made a post asking about this a while ago but it was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be.
Obviously the speedo wasn't changed.
The fuel gauge is reversed but accurate, and I could fix that easily if I cared enough to do so.
Similar to the Jeeps original engine the Camaro motor has a coolant temp sensor for the ECU and a different one for the gauges, I just used a replacement temp sensor from standard ignition and a bushing to make it fit the 3.1 block and now the gauge reads fine.
The tach just uses pulses from the ignition coil, so I just had to splice the connector from the Camaro harness unto the Jeep harness there.
Oil pressure I still haven't cared to figure out, but who cares about oil pressure?
