Eagle

I've towed a Comanche longbed (complete) on a tow dolly behind my shortbed MJ. That one was a piece of cake. I also hauled a partially stripped (but the body and drive train -- the heavy stuff -- were all intact) MJ on a flatbed car hauler intended for a much larger/longer vehicle than an XJ behind the shortbed MJ. That tow was across very hilly terrain from Massachusetts down to Connecticut -- and it was raining. We made it, but I wouldn't recommend it as a routine practice.

How about with BOTH locked? How do you think the Grand Cherokee WJ with the original Quadra-Drive works? Both axles have automatic lockers, and the transfer case has an internal differential. My WJ was a piece of junk for a lot of other reasons, but I loved the Quadra-Drive system.

mnkyboy, you have stated your case, and you keep regurgitating the same thing, but you're wrong. I'm not going to convince you, and you're certainly not going to convince me regardless of how many times you restate your position. You set your truck up the way you want, so allow other people to set theirs up the way they want. Simple.

You don't run a part-time transfer case in 4WD on dry pavement because the front and rear driveshafts are locked together and MUST rotate at the same speed. But the front wheels travel a wider arc than the rear wheels on turns, which means any time the vehicle is not traveling absolutely straight ahead, the drive shafts are trying to spin at different speed and are being resisted by the transfer case. Eventually, that strain results in something breaking. The full-time option, with the internal differential in the transfer case, completely eliminates this issue. That's why it's there.

The purpose of running full-time 4WD on the street is to have four wheels driving rather than two. Running with an auto-locker just helps ensure that all the wheels are working. I fail to see a problem. How does this in any way defeat the purpose of the full-time 4WD system? Seems to me it enhances it.

Please explain your reasoning. The full-time position uses a mechanical differential in the transfer case to allow the front and rear driveshafts to turn at different rotational speeds. The transfer case doesn't know and doesn't care in the front or rear differential is locked.

No.

Back when New Process/New Venture Gear published the strength of their transfer cases on-line, the NP231 was rated slightly stronger than the 242. The difference was negligible. A lot of the guys in NAXJA-NAC were running 242s, and I never saw one fail nor did I ever hear of one failing. The 242 does give up a little bit of ground clearance. I wouldn't call it a lot, and I don't think it's enough of a difference to worry about.

I've been running a high altitude CPS in the '88 Cherokee for years. My house is at elevation 460 above sea level. You don't even notice it's there, and if you drive with a lead foot you won't see any benefit from it. It allows the distributor more advance, but the Renix system also has a knock sensor, so any time you put your foot into it far enough to cause detonation, the knock sensor retards the timing back to where it would be with the seal level CPS anyway. I drive with a light foot, and I figure the high-altitude CPS is probably giving me a couple of miles per gallon.

I would just swap the tranny and transfer case. Even if you replace the dashboard cover, there's no need to remove the wiring harness from the vehicle. Why make unnecessary work for yourself?

Be glad it won't start. Trying to run it with leaking injectors is just inviting it to catch fire.

Yeah, if the odometer is working, the cable and drive gear at the lower end are okay. The problem has to be in the speedo head itself.

They sure do have some silly gun laws, though. And we're headed in the same direction under the leadership of His Royal Highness, Emperor Obama the First.

Won't work. My '88 Cherokee has the 10 x 1-3/4" brakes. The first time I did the brakes, the parts house sold me 10 x 2-1/2" shoes, and the drums wouldn't go on. Once I realized what was happening, I thought I was onto an easy way to upgrade my brakes, so I tried fitting a 2-1/2" drum I had from another Jeep. Still wouldn't seat. The 2-1/2" backing plate has a slight offset toward the centerline of the vehicle compared to the 1-3/4" backing plate. The drum hung up on the lip of the backing plate before the flange made contact. Won't work even with the 1-3/4" shoes. A friend in AZ told me a long time ago he used rear drums and backing plates off an old Ford Crown Vic police car, but those have been rear disc for so long the drum brake parts are just as hard to find as the Jeep parts. If you have nothing and need to be able to drive the vehicle, you can use the complete 1-3.4" brake setup, but you'll have to run it with the 1-3/4" shoes and drums. That's really not the end of the world. The front brakes do at least 60 percent of the work, and probably a lot more. Unless you routinely haul a full payload, I don't think you would ever notice the difference.

And 5 birghtness levels, too! {look carefully}

This is a joke, right? You want more power and performance and better throttle response out of a 200,000 mile engine ... AND you want better gas mileage? Not ... gonna ... happen. Just accept that your engine is tired, save whatever you might be tempted to spend today, and put it toward a rebuild. Personally, I'd go with a stock 4.0L with an RV cam rather than a stroker, but some people have made strokers work.

That's just the difference between a 2.8L and a 4.0L. The loss of power at altitude is a direct result of the loss of atmospheric pressure. Remember, no internal combustion engine can create compression pressure -- it just multiplies whatever is out there by the compression ratio. The closer the ambient gets to zero ... well, do the math. Zero times 100 is still zero. Want to know just how much difference altitude and atmospheric pressure make? In 1968, electric wipers were still an option on many cars. My 1968 Javelin had vacuum wipers. It also had the high-performance 343 c.i.d. V8, which in the day was a VERY fast engine (and mine ran better than most). I drove it across the country once, and one of my stops was Pike's Peak. It was very foggy and cool that day. The base elevation at Colorado Springs is around 7,000 feet and the summit is about 14,000. My wipers were very lazy at the base. By around 9,000 or 10,000 feet they just stopped working. Completely. Wouldn't even think about starting to give a twitch. Once I got off the mountain and back to around 6,000 feet they were fine, and they lasted as long as I had the car, which was another ten years or so. Don't ignore basic Physics.

I once had a 1947 Hudson pickup with a failed fuel pump ... and a carburetor. I was able to drive it several miles to get home by putting gasoline in a tin can with a barbed fitting in the bottom, and connecting that to the carb inlet with a length of rubber fuel line hose. Hung the can from a threaded rod under the hood and I was on the road. Try that with electronic, multiport fuel injection.

The Dakota 2.5L is the AMC/Jeep engine. Yes, the AX-15 tranny will fit, but it requires the correct bellhousing, which was used only by Dodge on the 2.5L Dakota.

Yep. I know a guy from the early days of NAXJA who knew his injectors were leaking. He drove his VERY customized rig to the dealership to buy new O-rings, paid his money, and walked out of the parts department to find his Jeep in flames. DO NOT DRIVE IT UNTIL IT'S FIXED.

You don't want to know. Trust me ... you really don't want to know.

For all the years that used two keys, the door key is the glove box key.

Aaaarrrggghhh! Missed that. My bad. WHY oh why do people do things like that?

Now don't go discouraging people by making it sound more difficult than it really is ...

They only work if you have all the sensors to feed them data.