Eagle

Ah! I see the plan. The problem with that plan is that the motor mount brackets are arms that stick out from the sides of the block and sit on top of the "frame" ears. Unless you want to fight with the bolts holding the motor mount brackets to the block, the motor has to come out by being lifted off the frame ears, it can't be dropped through them.

You can swap the drive train from one vehicle to the other, but not by swapping bodies. The XJ is completely unibody, and the Comanche is unibody to the back of the cab, with a frame grafted onto the back behind the cab for the box. The axle ratios for the 4-banger is probably 3.55, the 4.0L is 3.08.

You don't use it to heat the engine -- you leave it plugged in while the vehicle is parked so it's partially warmed up when you go to start it. I guess if you park the MJ for a week (or weeks) at a time, the drill would be to plug it in Friday night to be ready to go on Saturday morning.

I agree that yours are not factory mirrors or brackets. Does your truck have the vertical reinforcing member inside the doors? (Part #5 in Hornbrod's diagram.)

The factory unit was a freeze plug heater. I put one in an '88 XJ that I fixed up for an ex-GF who moved to Montana. It went on the left side of the block, IIRC in the front-most freeze plug hole.

True. I don't know how old your mother is, but I went to high school in the early 1950s and the "cool" cars then had the rear suspension dropped (to the point that some actually put small wheels under the rear bumper to protect it when entering driveways and such), with fender skirts for the rear wheel cutouts and continental spare tire carriers. There were some cars like that in the student lot at my high school that would easily win first prize if they showed up at any hot rod show today -- and they were the kids' daily drivers. What goes around, comes around.

There is no difference between 2WD steering and 4WD steering. The pitman arm is the same. As to the transfer case, what are you using for a shift linkage? The YJ linkage is very different from the XJ/MJ linkage and works in the reverse direction. In other words, you may be pushing when you should be pulling.

Dunno if you understood what Shelbyluvv wrote. There's a difference between "totalled" and "can't be fixed." "Totalled" is an insurance term, it doesn't mean it can't be fixed. Almost any damage can be repaired. The problem is that, if the cost to repair the damage exceeds the blue book value of the vehicle, the insurance company will only pay you the blue book value. That's supposed to "make you whole," in legal language, by giving you enough money to buy a replacement vehicle of supposedly comparable value. And when the insurance company hands you that check, they take title to your vehicle. If you want to keep it, then you have to buy it back from them by giving them back some of the money they just handed you. You can then use whatever's left over to try to repair the truck yourself. But ... the insurance company will have reported the VIN to the motor vehicle department as having been totalled, so that goes on your title. To register the truck again, you'll have to go through whatever inspection hoops your state has set up for inspecting vehicles that have been rebuilt from salvage. That's why the suggestion to try to avoid directly involving the insurance company.

Look everywhere. If the bumper is bent, most likely the frame is bent. I don't understand how a rear-end collision could push the engine into the radiator. Check your motor mounts.

Many, many people have done this. What you need to be aware of is that there is a slight difference in deck height between the 4.0L and 4.2L engines. If you do the "budget stroker" using stock 4.2L connecting rods, using OEM replacement pistons results in a bump in compression ratio that usually causes detonation problems. At least one of the companies that sold shop-built stroker engines used 4.0L rods with custom pistons. Other people deal with it by doing things like polishing and enlarging the combustion chambers in the head, and running a cam with enough overlap to effectively lower the compression. I remember at least one person who ran two head gaskets to decrease the compression -- but I don't recall how long that held together. By all means, spend a lot of time reading Dino's web site. Zero in on discussions of "quench."

You have to stop reading sources that don't know anything. That isn't true. My '88 Chief has a YJ transmission, transfer case, tranny shifter and transfer case shifter in it -- it was that way when I bought it. The transfer case shifter would have hit the dash, so it was cut off. The tranny shifter doesn't hit the dash.

Lock cylinders are set to work with keys by inserting the key and then filing the pins flush. Buy your new cylinder, then take it and your key to a locksmith. It shouldn't take him more than ten minutes to set the cylinder to work with that key.

If you have a '91 or '92, you can buy a high performance chip for the ECU. It increases power, but you have to run high-test gas with it. No, there is no chip available for the Renix years.

That's a YJ shifter. Much too high for an XJ/MJ.

The easiest way is to buy a Chief or Limited instrument cluster with the tach, and just swap the clusters. The wiring is already there. Since you have a Pioneer, your should already have gauges rather than idiot lights, so you wouldn't have to change any sensors.

How will your truck be used? Street? Highway? Off-road? Are you looking for good ride, good suspension control for high speed, or maximum articulation for rock crawling?

A failing fuel pump would not interrupt the spark, and therefore would not cause the tachometer to drop to zero while the engine is turning over in gear at highway speed. In this case, I think it has to be ignition related. CPS would be a good place to start.

I'd say it has to be ignition. The tachometer is electronic, not mechanical. If the engine stops firing but the vehicle is in gear and rolling, the engine will still be turning and a mechanical tach would still be showing RPMs. The electronic tach actually has no idea what the engine is doing, it's just counting ignition pulses. So if the tach drops to zero -- the ignition isn't firing momentarily. I would suggest focusing on that.

TIRE BALANCE!

That one was done using a full-length longbed box. Where my wife came from in South America, 4-door pick-em-ups are very popular. The beds are big enough to be useful (longer than a Cheromanche), but not even the six feet of an MJ shortbed. I think the boxes on those South American trucks are about five feet. I think a dual can MJ built on a shortbed would look okay. Yes, it would have a long wheelbase, but I've driven some dual cab full-size pickups. Those require a master mariner's license for piloting an ocean liner.

IMHO Jeep really screwed the pooch when they came out with the MJ. There is no usable storage inside the cab. They had the 2-door XJ, so they could easily have based the MJ on a 2-door XJ unibody, provided a smidge of interior storage space, and given better access to the space behind the seat all in one shot. Doing it the way they did was, IMHO, incredibly shortsighted.

The '87 isn't even OBD1. OBD1 came the Jeep in the 1991 model year. The Renix system used a proprietary scan tool. There were some professional grade scanners that had adapters and software to read Renix, but be sure that's what you're getting before you buy. Also, keep in mind that the Renix system doesn't store codes. Scanning a Renix is watching the data in real time, but if the engine won't start and run, there's nothing to read.

Lowe's? Home Depot? NAPA? http://www.amazon.com/300-Piece-Snap-Ring-Shop-Assortment/dp/B000K7GREQ%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-d-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB000K7GREQ Got a Harbor Freight near you? http://www.harborfreight.com/225-piece-retaining-ring-assortment-67654.html

I'm 100% on your side. And for me the same applies to Jeeps, firearms, or houses. Some years ago I looked at a house that was in my price range and looked good in the listing. On the way to see it the broker told me that the seller was a single woman and that some relative (an uncle, IIRC) was helping her out by fixing up some things to get the house ready to sell. OMFG! Doors that weren't straight. New roof shingles that looked like they were put down by a drunk at midnight. And it just got worse from there. After about five minutes I told the agent I was not interested. I also suggested that he tell the woman if she wanted to sell the house NOT to let her [uncle] touch one single thing more. I bought my '88 MJ Chief with a lift installed NOT because it had a lift, but because it was an MJ and I wanted to rescue it from the dweeb who had been hacking on it. The selling price was a lot lower than what he was asking, and I wasn't about to go a penny higher. I ran it with the lift for two years, I think, then took it out and put the suspension back to factory configuration. Working on a truck like that is an exercise in ambivalence for me -- I HATE seeing what people do to perfectly good vehicles, but I derive a lot of satisfaction when I'm able to satisfactorily undue the destruction. The bottom line is that, for most people, NOBODY else would modify a Jeep exactly the way you would want it. And for that reason, IMHO it's just plain silly to expect someone else to pay top dollar for your mo=difications.

Not at all the same thing. Lots of people have done the Cheromanche mod, and you get a vehicle that has a load bed that's no more than two feet long. Now HERE's a nice crew cab XMJ: