Eagle

It wasn't a recall, but there was a TSB (Technical Service Bulletin). Apparently there's significant enough current losss in the factory harness that Jeep came out with a separate, stand-alone harness that runs directly from the CPS connector through the firewall into the ECU. The harness should still be available from Jeep dealers.

Front axle u-joints? Rear drive shaft u-joints?

Mine has 285,000 on it.

They WERE clearcoated. Once the clearcoat gets compromised, it traps moisture underneath and promotes oxidation. When that happens, the only approach is to strip the clearcoat, polish, and then decide if you want to try spray-on clearcoat in a can, or accept that you'll need to polish periodically. I use Aircraft Stripper (that's a brand name) from Auto Zone. Like the one mentioned above, I believe it's acidic and should not be left on too long. I do it at a coin-op car wash on a day when they're slow. Put the wheels on the floor near the drain, paint of the stripper with a cheap chip brush from Lowe's or Home Depot, let it work for a minute or two, then fire up the car wash and wash it off. If it doesn't get completely stripped, I repeat as necessary. A pressure washer at home would do the same thing, but (a) I don't have a pressure washer, and (B) I'm on a well, which is near my driveway and garage, and I don't feel like dumping a bunch of somewhat nasty chemicals into my water supply. I don't recoat. I might try one wheel as an experiment, but once they're stripped it isn't too hard to polish them occasionally.

Ever look at an XJ spring? It's flat. MJ springs are arched. It DOES make a difference.

Well, maybe you Cheyennes don't smoke "that stuff whose name begins with 'P'," but there are sects within some of the southwestern tribes that do. "That stuff" is specifically exempted from Federal and state drug laws when used for ceremonial purposes for a reason. The notion that there is ONE flavor of "Native American spirituality" when there are (or were) something like 385 distinct tribal groups in the continental United States alone is sort of silly.

Rancho doesn't list a 3" AAL for a Comanche. What AAL did you use?

Looks that way to me.

It depends on whether it's spring under or spring over, and how flat the springs are. For a typical spring-under, like a stock MJ, there's a lot of arch in the spring. The shackle should be basically vertical, because when the spring compresses it gets flatter and longer, and when it droops it needs to pull the shackle forward. In a SOA like a stock XJ, the spring is basically flat at rest. It can't get any longer, so the shackle can/should point back. The spring arches more and gets shorter whether the suspension compresses or droops, so the shackle will never need to swing farther back.

As often is the case, "it depends." There's no difference between a 231 for an automatic and a 231 for a 5-speed. But ... if she's looking to convert a 2WD into a 4WD, she needs a 4WD tranny. You can't bolt a transfer case to a 2WD transmission with changing the tailshaft and the tailshaft housing. Secondly, the early 231s had a 21-spline connection between the transmission and the transfer case. The later ones used 23 splines. I can never remember when the change took place -- somewhere around 1990, I believe. So in order to provide a better, more definitive answer, we need to know what she's trying to do. If she's just replacing a busted transfer case -- no problem as long as the "new" one comes from the same "generation." If she's doing a 2WD to 4WD conversion, it's more complicated.

Speaking as someone who was in charge of hiring for a mid-size, national architecture/engineering firm for several years -- you should be aware that most positions have more than one applicant, and the resumes have to be filed. We use standard letter (or legal) folders for that. And most HR people sit at desks, not drafting tables. They have neither the space nor the spare time to take your resume across the room and tape it to a window so they can get far enough away to read it. My reaction as an employer if I were to receive something like that in response to a position being advertised would be to assume you're not serious about your work or my job, and to throw it away. If you make life more difficult for me and my staff while applying for the job, I would have to assume you would be an even bigger PITA if I were to make the mistake of hiring you. Just sayin' ...

Possibly the transmission mount has compressed and the exhaust pipe is tapping on the cross member.

It sounds like you're fairly close. Maybe your truck idles fast. Before you go ripping the cluster out again, get your hands on an idle tach (or a regular add-on tach that hasn't been installed) and use that to check the RPMs showing on your cluster tach through the range covered by the idle tach. You can take the feed from the smaller of the diagnostic plugs under the hood. I posted a pin-out for that connector a couple of weeks sgo.

Who cares about idle? The purpose of a tachometer is to tell you when to shift. You need it to be accurate in the range where you normally drive. I don't know any way to get it right other than to calibrate it against a known-good tachometer.

My spreadsheet doesn't include 205/75 tires, but for 215/75R15s, with 3.55 gears 4th gear would be 3114 RPM at 70 MPH, and 5th gear would be somewhere around 2242 RPM. With 215s and 4.10 gears, 70 MPH would be 3607 RPM in 4th gear and around 2597 in 5th. These are based on actual tire manufacturers' revolutions-per-mile specifications, not a theoretical calculation based on tire diamater that doesn't account for sidewall compression in service.

When you get it, do not overfill it. The coolant in the system expands when it gets hot. The tank is designed to allow the air in it to compress. If there's insufficient air space, it can't compress and the excess hot coolant has to go somewhere.

Quadratec (www.quadratec.com) has the cap and bottle for around $25. I posted a link to their listing about a week or ten days ago. Be sure to buy the cap and bottle together. Typically, the old cap doesn't seal on a new bottle, and a new cap won't seal on an old bottle.

We did talk about this before, and I checked both my '88 XJ and my '88 MJ and found that the front and rear driveshafts ARE locked with the transfer case in neutral. My recollection is that your vehicle in those videos doesn't have the original transfer case in it.

No it doesn't. A few years ago the axle end fittings on my '88 XJ were so soaked with oil that they got too soft to seal. I was astonished one day leaving my GF's house in a snow storm that I couldn't get up the hill on my normal route home. The light was on, but the axle wasn't engaged. I think there's a switch for the light on the firewall. It really doesn't tell you much of anything except that you have enough vacuum to turn on the switch.

Jeep has (or had) two repair kits -- one was for minor separation and the other was for major separation. They gave some criteria in the TSB for deciding which kit you need but I don't recall what the numbers were. If it's still available, I think the "major" kit would fix this, because IIRC the repair strap extends well beyond the original hinge weld area.

"Steep"? Man, I knew Jeepers were notoriously cheap, but you guys give the word an entirely new meaning. D44s were selling for $500 to $600 ten years ago. $225 for an XJ D44 isn't "cheap," it's Grand Larceny. They don't make 'em any more, ya know ... L_N_F has a point, though. A D44 in a '90 XJ would be highly unusual.

The short bed has a shorter wheelbase, so the tailpipe is shorter both in front of the axle and behind. That pressure bottle is supposed to have pressure in it. It's part of the pressurized cooling system, it is NOT an "overflow" bottle like on the 91 and newer models. The cap IS the radiator (pressure) cap for the cooling system. DO NOT open it when the engine is warm or hot. It is properly filled if it is half full when cold. There's a post inside, beneath the cap, that's marked (notched) to show the correct fill level.

Nope. The pewgoat was used behind the 4.0L I-6 from 1987 through mid-1989. The 2.8L 5-speed was probably an Aisin-Seiki AX5, although there's a very remote possibility of a T-5 (which Jeep used occasionally if they ran short on AX5s).

To follow up Pete's suggestion, you are more likely to find an AX5 in a 4WD vehicle. Go ahead and buy the tranny and the transfer case. You can just leave it in 2WD, but you'll be that far ahead if you decide to make it a 4WD later on. If you can get both the front and rear axles and the front driveshaft from the donor, you'll have all the parts.

Aside from being underpowered and using atruly awful carburetor, the 2.8L engine has a propensity for sticking connecting rods through the side of the block. It really is a pretty terrible engine.