Eagle

Is there a woman in the house? I lived in this house for ten years before I married my wife, and the previous house for another ten. In twenty years, I have never had the cord for any phone in the house get knotted or twisted. Now that I'm married, I have to untangle the phone cord (the one from the phone to the handset) every time I want to use the phone. It's especially annoying when it's an incoming call and I'm running to pick up before the answering machine grabs it. Then there are seat belts. My '88 XJ has over 287,000 miles on it and is 22 years old this month. The shoulder belt on the driver's side has never been tangled. I think EVERY time my wife rides with me, the shoulder belt on the passenger side gets flipped over where it goes through the B pillar loop. The mystery is, it's TOUGH to get it flipped back the way it should be. I cannot understand how she gets it messed up so consistently and so effortlessly. There's no question, it's a gender thing.

Nameless -- Does your MJ have an internal slave cylinder? If so, did you install a new one when you swapped the transmission? If it's a new, internal slave, did you follow the instructions and leave the "zip tie" intact while bleeding?

That site has been around for quite awhile. I'm happy to see that it's still out there. I like these: http://kalecoauto.com/index.php?main_pa ... ucts_id=14

Why?

The fan essentially IS a propeller. But ... the fan used on the XJ and MJ has a heavy center section, to which thin, stainless steel vanes are riveted. The vanes are flexible. The reason is to allow them to move more air at low RPM but to flatten out at higher RPM, reducing the parasitic drag on the engine when cooling isn't as necessary. And then there's the fan clutch, which also reduces fan velocity at high speed. I suppose it is possible for the fan blades to get bent forward into the radiator, but I've been on wheeling trips that saw water up to the top of the grille and I have never seen anyone have the fan get damaged. Between the blades flexing and the clutch de-clutching, I don't think it's an issue.

The circuits are plug-n-play on the fuse panel. Why mess around with cutting and splicing and moving one wire at a time? Just yank the old panel, plug in a new panel, and fix any contacts that are bad in the plugs when you reconnect it.

Or if you like heat on your feet when going uphill ...

The heater core may have a leak, and you're hearing coolant being forced out under pressure. Have you replaced the fuel filter? It may be plugged and the fuel pump is groaning under too heavy a load.

AWESOME photos. I'd love to see that ... I think. Except that I can be mildly clautrophobic, and I'm not sure exactly how I might react if I actually got in there.

Your gauge is not "jumping around." The oil pressure goes up when the engine RPMs increase, and goes down when the RPMs decrease. The gauge should show that. "Jumping around" would be if you held the RPMs at a constant speed and the needle was jumping all over the place. The factory spec on oil pressure, at normal operating temperature, is a minimum of 13 psi at idle (650 RPM), and between 37 and 75 psi above 1600 RPM. The rule of thumb about "10 psi per 1000 RPM" is exactly that -- a rule of thumb. I've never EVER seen it be that way in a real vehicle. In practice, most of the XJs and MJs I have owned idle at 25 to 30 psi, and run between 50 and 55 psi at highway speeds (55 to 70 MPH). Once warmed up, I've never seen any of them run higher than 55 psi at 70 MPH. My '88 XJ dropped to just under 40 psi at highway speeds around the time I hit 175,000 miles on conventional 10W40 oil, so I switched over to 5W50 full synthetic and it went back up to around 45 psi. I'm now at 287,000+ miles and the oil pressure still runs about 45 psi on the road, so I'll live with that. But, back to your post -- the oil pressure SHOULD be lower at idle than it should at 2000 RPM. If it isn't, either the gauge is bad, the sender is bad, or you have bearing or oil pump problems.

Eagle, my 87 4cyl, column shift had the metal retainer for the cable. Swtiched to the cluster from my 88 for the full guage package and was able to get the cable to attach with some minor modifications. That confirms my suspicions. Do you remember what you had to do to get the cable to attach to the newer style speedo head?

With 33" tires and 4.88 gears, in overdrive 70 MPH is 2700 RPM. That's not excessively "low" gearing, that's right about where you want to be.

I would avoid both 96 and 97. 96 was the first year for OBD II, but it was the last year of the old body style so they cobbled together a bunch of wires and circuits to implement OBD II as an overlay to the existing OBD I wiring harness. In computer terminology, it was a kludge. 97 was the first year for the new body style, with a totally new wiring harness and a bunch of other stuff that was first time implementation. On the surface, it looks like a minor cosmetic update, but it's a totally new chassis wiring harness, different instrument panel dual airbags for the first time, etc. I would look for a 1998 through 2001. If you're at all interested in brakes, they were still using the crappy composite rotors in the front until mid-1999, so if I were looking, I'd be looking for a late 99, 2000 or 2001.

They don't all have a junction downstream from the speedo head. I believe that's only for vehicles equipped with factory cruise control. It's not that unusual to find it on junkyard XJs, but I'm surprised your MJ had it. Do you have cruise?

:agree: Replace the fuse panel.

No, it has a skinny rod between the two latches. The write-up addresses your setup. The only other setup was the 84 - 86 style that had a single latch in the center.

Also dependent on your choice of shock absorbers, because you want to snub the suspension before the shock absorber bottoms out. A few shocks are designed to also act as bump stops ... but most are not.

Where on the frame is this? Got a couple of views from a little farther back, to put the damage in perspective and give a better idea of the relative extent?

4.88s

Rich would backfire through the exhaust. Lean can backfire through the intake. Timing (distributor and/or cam timing) could be an issue. Also check for vacuum leaks. If you have a leak, the engine pulls the highest vacuum when decelerating, so a leak would have the most effect then and could be creating a lean mixture that the O2 sensor can't adapt for quick enough (or "enough," period).

You have to go through 4-HI to get into 4-Lo. Plus, there's a detent -- when you pull the lever straight back, it goes into 4-Hi and stops at a step or gate -- you then have to move the lever toward the passenger side before you can pull it farther back. Then it has to go through Neutral before it engages 4-Lo. It does not sound from here like you have a temperature-related problem, it sounds like you have a mechanical problem. You mention having run it in 4-Hi before. Was this perhaps on dry pavement? If so, you may have fubared the chain in the transfer case, which could account for problems when trying to run in 4WD.

How old is the oxygen sensor? And are you sure the O2 sensor has a good connection?

I'm looking forward to seeing photos, and I think it's great that a teenager cares enough about his cuz to even bother to post.

What did you use for a heat source? Is a hair dryer hot enough? If so, do you use the high setting, or low or medium?

I have a couple of Peugeots, an AX-15, and a 3550. NONE of them want to shift from first to second when cold. And the 3550 uses some new, super-duper uber lube that was specicially formulated for that tranny and the 4500. It's the nature of the beast. Using synthetic gear lube helps, but be sure if you have an AX-15 that you get one that doesn't have sulfur-bearing compounds in it -- they attack the synchros. Redline has been reported to work well.