I have lots of thought LOL.
First off I can tell you from experience you cannot just "throw" and AX15 into the cj.
To answer your question though the benifit of not using the internal slave is that if your slave cylinder goes out you can replace it without dropping the whole
Transmission . With the external slave you could just unbolt the slave and replace it if need be.
You can convert an internal slave ax15 to external but you will need some parts from an external slave model (bellhousing, throw out fork, etc) I dont know the exact stuff because I just bought an external model when I did it.
Things that you will need to make your AX15 swap
AX15(of course)
4.0 flywheel
4.0 inspection plate
4.0 starter
Advance adapter
Dana 300 to ax15 kit
tranny mount (preferably from an ax 15 I fabed my own)
New driveshafts( you may be able to just have a shop shorten/lengthen you old shafts)
That should be it mostly.
There are issues that you should be aware of as well:
With a stock height suspension I currently only have about an inch of clearence with between the front drive shaft and the bell housing. THis can be negated in several ways. First (what I am going to try) My stock springs are obviously warped and need to be replaced, Second is a spring lift to push the axle down further and third is to get offset motor mounts from novak or AA and push your engine towar the drivers fender well.
That being said, if you are running any sort of lift on your
CJ5 I would definitely put some time into measuring your old drive train compared to your new one. In a
CJ7 the rear axle is further back than your 5 and I am currently at like 19.5 inches on the rear drive shaft. Since your axle is closer then I could imagine this would get alot shorter and if you were running any lift you are looking at an extremeley steep angle between your yolks. I am not saying it won't work but I am saying that you should make sure that it will before you install the tranny.
Also you are most likely not going to be able to avoid cutting your tub to make room for your shifter. I went twin stick on my swap so I had to cut alot more up but I don't see how you could avoid cutting even retaining the original shifter.
Finally I suggest you put alot of thought into your clutch pedal. The geometry on the pedals was well thought out by a team of engineers at jeep. So if you do something different then say in a yj where one of these trannies would be found then youa re basically reverse engineering what these engineers did. It takes very little effort to swap in the pedal assembly from a YJ. The brakets are only slighty different so you may be able to get away with just swapping the YJ clutch pedal to the cj assembly but I like to do things all the way. I swapped in the entire assembly and this also allowed me to swap in a YJ brake booster and avoid that trouble people have with adjusting the brake rod for the CJ pedals. Now all my pedals will function like in a factory jeep and not like someone made it in a garage on the fly.
