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Comment by Steve Anderson on July 24, 2011 at 6:33am

Dave Randall is known for his Mopar street rods. But this most recent project is a departure, sort of. Technically Jeep is a division of Chrysler so he is sticking with his overall Mopar theme, but that’s where this build heads off in a different direction.

The usual focus of Dave’s projects is major horsepower. His late sixties Coronet, for instance, generates 840 horse power, on the street and on pump gas. But this 1985 Jeep is a departure. It does have an AMC 304 V8 in it, and there are some performance modifications, but as with his other cars, the build was undertaken with a theme in mind.

That theme is on and off road functionality. The last two years for  the 304 in CJs were ’80 and ’81. The reason being that smog controls severely restricted its ability to breath. So much so that horse power figures were only slightly above the 258 inline six at 125 for the 304 versus 110 for the 258.  

Dave set out to cure the 304s asthmatic performance with what he terms  an ‘RV’ cam, for bottom end. A Holley four barrel carb sitting on an Edelbrock intake handles the fuel/air mixture. Spent gasses are routed through Hedman headers and quieted with a pair of Purple Hooters. All this adds up to a healthy sounding Jeep.

As with all of Dave’s projects, this build is very clean. Everything is what and where it should be. An example of his attention to detail is shown in the glove box. The correct latch is there, but he’s having a hard time finding an original catch to mate with it. I pointed out that it would be easy to fabricate one, but he quickly dismissed that idea. The catch will have to be original.  

Dave did do a little fabrication on the Jeep. He made his own upper front shock mounts. Other than that, the Jeep speaks for itself. In fact, it’s so clean and correct that you’d never know that the build only took him two months from start to finish.