Eagle

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.

The headlight delay module plugs directly onto the headlight switch, between the switch body and the wiring harness connector.

It's a unibody. Once you separate the uni from the body ... then what are you going to do? Better idea would be to cut the bed frame rails a foot or so behind the cab, then see if they'll sell it that way. That part is spliced on anyway. If they won't go for that, also cut the front frame horns forward of the firewall. Those can also be grafted back on. I don't think you should even consider trying to separate the cab from the rails.

Bingo. I believe that "miniature shock absorber" is nothing more than a vibration damper and could probably be eliminated if you're not fanatical about minimizing "noise, vibration and harshness" (as the Chrysler/Jeep engineers refer to it). I'd have to trudge out through the snow to check, but my guess is that the engine damper (which is on the right side of the engine) probably occupies the space where the steering box brace is supposed to mount.

They are sidelit -- there are about half a dozen little push-in bulbs scattered around the gauge cluster, between the gauges so you can't see them behind the opaque areas on the bezel. To replace them you pull the cluster, rotate each socket a quarter turn, and they pop right out. Don't overlook the fact they are on a dimmer. Rotating the headlight knob when the lights are on controls the brightness, and all the way in one direction (don't recall which, because it has been years since I played with mine) turns them off completely. If the dimmer part of the headlight switch is bad, you won't have dash lights, and the only fix for that is a new switch (which isn't that expensive).

Nope. That's why messing with the bushings will have to wait until Spring. We just had our second snowfall of the year today.

So please tell us what you figured out. It might help someone else.

It's not that simple. Over-simplifying a bit (but not much), the shocks in a stock suspension are chosen so that at normal curb weight the shock piston is at mid-height in the shock body, and there's equal up-travel and down travel. The bump stops are set so the suspension hits the bump stop before the piston "bottoms out" in the shock body, and before the tire hits the bodywork. Everything works ... because everything was designed to work together. Looking up stock shocks on the Monroe web site, the total travel varies a bit from one shock to another but it's basically 7-1/2 inches. http://www.monroe.co...talog/e-Catalog http://www.monroe.co...LengthSheet.pdf So you install a lift, and bigger tires. Let's pick a 4" lift and 31" tires for example. Stock tires are around 29" diameter, so a 31 is two inches bigger in diameter (duh!), or one inch higher above the axle. The stock shock travel is 7-1/2". For simplicity, call it 8". Half of that is 4". If the shock piston is designed to ride at the point of mid-travel, if you lift the body 4" higher off the axle, the lift will actually pull the shock all the way up, and cause it to "top out" in the shock body. With a 2" budget boost, the piston will ride 2" higher in the shock body, but won't top out. So for the 4" lift, we need a shock with more travel so the mid-travel point will be 4" higher. That's actually a shock 8 inches longer, for a total travel length of 16 inches. You're not going to find one, at least from Monroe. Their longest are in the 10-1/2" to 11" range (and those may not have the correct mounts on each end). But let's pretend you can find one that offer 12" of travel, to keep the math simple. The suspension is lifted 4 inches, the shock has 4" more travel, so the mid-travel point has been raised 2 inches. But with a 4" lift you're riding 2" higher than that, so you now don't have 6" of up-travel and 6" of down travel. You have 4" of up-travel and 8" of down travel. Based on the original setup, you had 4" of down travel (actually, slightly less), and the bump stops were set to limit the travel to less than that so the shock wouldn't bottom out. If you don't change the bump stops, your down travel is the original 4" plus the 4" your lift added, so the body will now drop 8" before you hit the bump stops. With our theoretical shock, that's exactly at the point of bottoming out. Since there really isn't a shock offering 12" of travel, in a real world situation the shocks WILL bottom out before the bump stops make contact. Back to the budget boost. Adjust the above numbers by a difference of 2" and see what you come up with. In a perfect world, you would use a shock 4 inches longer and extend the bump stops by a full 2 inches to protect the shocks. But you're really only likely to find a shock that's about 2" longer (around 10" or travel), raising the mid-travel point by one inch when the lift is about 2". And none of this even deals with the other side of the problem, which is preventing bigger tires from hitting the bodywork.

Great. Considering that I don't have the tools (or the time, with Winter upon us) to mess with the axle bushings, I think I'll swap out the UCAs and see how it goes. That's going to have to take care of a lot of the noise and slop I have left. I can live with what's likely to be left at least until Spring.

But the listings I find don't specify if the bushing is for the axle or the arm, except for one source (don't recall which) that appears to list a different bushing for the axle than for the arm. Are the two ends the same, or different?

Still fighting rattles and clunks in the front of the "new" 2001 XJ. Replacing the lower control arms helped a lot, but there's still noise and things are still shifting around as the road surface changes, so it's time to move on to the upper control arms. Problem: On the forward end, the bushings are in the axle, not in the arms. Chrysler-Jeep wants $49 EACH just for the bushings. Not gonna happen (I hope). Quadratec claims to have them, but their OEM part number doesn't match the part number from any of the various years of XJ factory parts manuals. AutoZone lists a bushing, but in one place they say it's a front bushing and in another place they say it's a rear bushing. To further confuse a doddering senior citizen, Quadratec's listing is only for up through 1999 for the XJ. And, sure enough, the factory listing is different for a 2001 than it is for earlier years. Two questions: 1. For the UPPER control arms, is the bushing in the arm the same as the bushing for the axle, or are they different? 2. Is the axle bushing for a 2001 really different from the axle bushing in, say, a 1996, or is this just a superseded part number? Thanks. Oh, BTW -- will a Harbor Freight ball joint press give me the bits and pieces I need to press out and replace the UCA bushings in the axle?