Eagle

The brackets you need are already attached to your bench seat. The only difference is that an MJ with buckets doesn't have the wire connecting the two pedestals, and the one on the passenger side has an adjusting lever. You could use it, and just set the seat at mid-travel or all the way back before bolting it into the truck. The "rocking chair" feature isn't part of the seat pedestal, it's part of the seat. What you want is to find seats from an MJ that doesn't have the rocking chair seats.

If you're getting any "ratcheting" on turns, it means you need to add friction modifier to the gear lube. That's not really a "problem" in my book, because it proves that the limited slip clutches aren't worn out and that they still have some grab left in them.

If they have already cracked near the bead, it's too late. Otherwise, spray them well every couple of weeks with one of the foam tire care products. Be sure to spray the back sides as well as the outsides. Also, keep the pressure up more or less to spec, and if possible move the truck or jack it up and spin the tires a quarter revolution every few weeks.

Yes, and no. A limited slip differential was a factory option, but Jeep called it Trac-Lok. "Posi" is short for "Positraction," and that name belongs to Generous Motors.

The metal clips (what I call "speed nuts" are supposed to be stuck on the wheels. They are spring clips, with teeth that grab the plastic nubs of the cap and provide something for the screws to screw into. The ones on the wheels are not "stuck" -- they still have the screws holding them onto the wheels. Jim's eighth photo shows what they look like from the back side of the wheel. Those five hex heads are the sheet metal screws that go into the spring clips. Please note that I did NOT suggest using ViseGrips -- I wrote "needle nose pliers." If you use ViseGrips you'll crush the spring clips/speed nuts. If you use needle nose pliers, you can grab one edge and carefully remove the screw. Then you should be able to press the clip back onto the nub on the center cap.

Of course, you could cheat -- connect a toggle switch to the 4WD light and just flip the switch on anytime you shift into 4WD. Back in the halcyon days of my youth, that's what I used to do when I converted cars from "three on the tree" column shift to 3-speed floor shift.

These are the ones with the speed nuts on the back: The only difference between these two is that the second has a chrome(like) center and outer ring. They both look like this on the back: What happens is that some previous owner who doesn't know how they work pries the caps off from the front, which pulls the nubs on the cap out of the speed nuts and leaves the wheel with the speed nuts visible from the front and the hex-head sheet metal screws still in place on the rear. It's extremely unlikely that you'll break the screw trying to remove the speed nuts, but it's very possible that you can destroy the speed nuts if you don't soak everything down beforehand with PB Blaster, and if you don't proceed with a bit of care. You need access to the back of the wheel to put a socket or nut driver on the head, so obviously the final attempt gets done with the wheel off the vehicle. But you can spray the rusty speed nuts with PB Blaster from the front. I have had good luck rescuing the speed nuts and pressing them back onto the nubs of the caps. Jim, your first two photos are the front and back of the snap-in center caps for the 10-spoke turbine wheels. There are no screws involved with those, so that can't be what he's asking about. (However, if you have a few of those gathering dust, send me a PM. I need a few.)

If you lock the CAD in the engaged position, you don't need any vacuum switch. With the CAD locked, the vacuum only operates the 4WD light, and it's pretty easy to tell when you're in 4WD by the position of the lever ... and the whining noise from the transfer case.

I already answered this. http://comancheclub.com/topic/36293-1986-hubcaps/

Can you weld? Or do you have a friend who can weld? You CAN buy replacement floor pans for an XJ and weld them in. They won't fit right, but they can be made to work. $$$$$ You can spend some time and effort cutting the floors out of a wrecked XJ and weld them in. $$1/2 Or you can do what I did. Lowe's sells sheet steel in two thicknesses. I used the thicker. They had one width that was perfect from going from the frame rail to the transmission tunnel, and a narrower size was perfect for the frame rail to the outer sill. A friend's father welded them in for me. Undercoated the bottom, and used a quart of bedliner on the topside. $

On both my '39 Hudson coupe and my '47 Hudson pickup, I replaced the mechanical fuel pump with a Stewart-Warner electric fuel pump It made life a WHOLE lot easier.

Here - http://minimopar.knizefamily.net/oilfilterstudy.html Read ALL of it.

Mea culpa. I confess, I've never seen a 2.8L fuel pump. I know it's mechanical, and every mechanical fuel pump I ever saw, from my 1939 Hudson right up through the 70s AMCs and small-block Chevies, had the same mount and the same arm. So I made the classic blunder -- I assumed.

Those fuel pumps are mechanical, and they operate by an arm that's activated by a lobe on the camshaft. If the cam pushes the arm too far, it destroys the diaphragm in the pump just because of overtravel. The cure is to space out the pump body from the block so the pump arm contacts the cam lobe at the very tip. If you still have the pumps that self-destructed, take a look at the arms and see if you can find any marks that show where the arm made contact wityh the cam.

Are you saying a new Wrangler weighs twice as much as an MJ? If so, you need to check your specs again. You're wrong. The problem is that the JK "Dana 44" is the same hybrid, pseudo Dana 44 that was used in the TJ Rubicons, with the same thin axle tubes and small outers -- except that they made it wider, which means there's a longer lever arm working the axle tubes against the diff housing. It's okay for street use on factory-size tires, but bigger tires and the stress of off-roading is too much for it. The tubes bend. That's been well documented, and written up in many of the off-road magazines. You may not choose to accept it, but it HAS been well-documented. The fix is as described above -- install sleeves inside the axles to effectively increase the wall thickness of the tubes, and gusset the outer ends where the Cs are mounted to the tubes.

Nope. unless he has an HO there is no PCM -- the Renix XJs and MJs have an ECU (Engine Control Unit). It doesn't control any other part of the power train. on cold start it runs in open loop mode, which ignores input from the sensors and uses a hard-coded air/fuel map. It doesn't enter closed loop mode (ECU control) until the coolant temp sensor sees around 165 to 175 degrees. For me, on winter mornings, that happened two miles down the road -- I could actually feel a slight hesitation then a surge as the transition took place.

Those rusty nubs are spring nuts -- the bolts (or screws) are accessed from the back side, with the wheels off the vehicle. If you soak them well with PB Blaster for a few days, you should be able to use needle-nose pliers to grab one flange of the spring nut while removing the bolt/screw from the rear. If the rusty nubs aren't totally gone, wire brush them and press them back onto the projections in the center caps. Clean up the threads on the mounting screws and apply anti-seize before reinstalling.

Au contraire. There is a problem with straight weight oils. They don't flow well when cold, which can result in dry bearings and dry cylinder walls when the engine is started in cold weather. I'm old enough to remember when all we had was straight weight oils, and multi-viscocity was considered a modern miracle when it was introduced. And engines last a LOT longer with it. 250,000 to 350,000 miles is nothing special these days. In the days of straight-weight oil, if an engine made it to 100,000 without a major tear-down and rebuild, THAT was considered a miracle.

I use Catco from Summit racing.

Because the thermostat didn't open yet. The thermostat is on the front of the engine. The sender for the temp gauge is on the left rear corner of the head, which is sort of a localized hot spot, so it always reads warmer than most of the rest of the system. That sender doesn't control anything, so it's not a foolproof indication of what the coolant temperature is at the thermostat. How did you fill the system after flushing? Just pouring coolant in through the coolant bottle won't do it. It didn't come on because the system wasn't hot enough. The aux fan on an '88 is controlled by the sensor in the driver's side radiator tank. Until the temperature of the coolant running through that tank reaches something like 210 or 220 degrees, the fan doesn't turn on. BTW ... you aren't supposed to fill the coolant bottle to the top. It should be filled halfway when cold -- no more, no less.

A bad ground causes resistance. Resistance causes heat. Basic physics.

Whatever you read about seats is not complete, or you didn't read to the end. The seats themselves are the same. The lower seat frames, which includes the part that bolts to the floor, is completely different for the XJ and for the MJ, and they do not interchange. In addition, most early-year XJ buckets (2-door and 4-door) have the "rocking chair" frames that allow the lower seat cushion angle to be adjusted as well as the angle of the seat back. The rocking chair mechanism adds extra height, and if those seats are mounted on MJ seat pedestals and put into an MJ, the seats will be much higher than stock seats.

I run Castrol Syntec -- full synthetic. Oil filters are Purolator. For oil weight, the factory called for 10W30 or 10W40. I ran 10W40 up to around 200,000 miles. At that point, the highway pressure was a little lower than it used to be (still well within factory spec), so I changed to 5W50.

The headlight circuit is protected by a circuit breaker that's built into the headlight switch. My guess is that the integral circuit breaker has gone loco and that you need a headlight switch. But, just for giggles -- the next time it happens try flipping the dimmer switch -- maybe that's funky. It's on the bottom of the steering column, so it would warm up quickly once the heater starts blowing on it.

Check spark plug gap.