Eagle

Oil smoke is blue, not white. Either you didn't really find the problem, or you're nearly as color-blind as I am :)

The way I was always taught to do it (with Marvel Mystery Oil) was to pour roughly 1/2 to 2/3 of the can through the carburetor or throttle body slowly. The engine will start to smoke heavily and run very rough, but pour slowly enough that it keeps running. When you get to about 1/3 can (bottle) left, dump it in fast. The engine will choke and stall. Let the stuff sit and soak for about 15 minutes to half and hour, then start it up and run it to clean out the gunk. Did I mention that it will smoke -- HEAVILY?

Maybe on this forum we should stick to discussing Comanches. There's a reason why many forums don't allow politics to be discussed ...

+10,000! The operable vents LEAK. Count your blessings that you have the fixed windows and save your money for something that will be an improvement. I paid extra to get the optional operable vents on my '88 Cherokee. The XJ is now 20-1/2 years old. For 20 of those 20-1/2 years the vents have been glued shut with silicone because that's the only way I could stop the leaks.

shake starting at 55 MPH is almost always tire balance. I don't know why that's the magic speed, but that has been the case since I first started playing with cars, and that was over 50 years ago. Just because you paid some shop to balance your tires doesn't mean they are balanced. It just means they took your money and slapped some weights on the rims. Try rotating the front tires to the rear and the rears to the front and see what happens.

On the pre-97 XJs and MJs, the mirror control is a multi-directional switch mounted in the center console. There's no reason you couldn't use the blank switch panel to the right of the steering column, since on most MJs it has nothing in it. Get yourself a set of three single-pole, double-throw, center off toggle switches. Use one to control which mirror you're working with, one for the vertical adjustment and one for the horizontal. Or score an XJ mirror control switch and mount that in the aforementioned spot on the dashboard.

I made ONE trip pulling a borrowed aluminum car trailer with an already-stripped XJ body/chassis on it with my MJ. You do NOT want to be pulling a trailer weighing more than 5000 pounds behind an MJ. Seriously, Mate -- start looking for Plan B right now.

Depending on where it lets go, a blown head gasket may allow coolant into the oil, or it may allow coolant into the cylinders and skip the oil. Coolant in the cylinders results in white smoke out the tail pipe. The only reliable way to diagnose a possible blown head gasket is a compression test. You haven't explained where the white smoke was coming from. Ws it from the tailpipe, or was it under the hood somewhere? Please explain the comment about blowing all the coolant out of the overflow bottle so there was none. That's not possible. Any coolant pushed out of the radiator goes into the recovery bottle. If there's too much for that, then the excess gets pushed out the overflow tube on the recovery bottle. If there WAS coolant in the bottle, and then it was empty, either the bottle spring a leak or the system worked like it should and sucked all the coolant back into the radiator. That could only happen if you were seriously low on coolant.

To do it right, you need not only the grille but also the header (the front panel that the grille mounts in), complete with side lights and headlight buckets. You also need the 97+ bumper and splash apron. You will need the 97+ front flares, but you do NOT need the hood -- the hood didn't change.

Must have been one of the ones with a Ford engine, then. The originals used AMC engines, which were bullet-proof and bomb-proof.

Odds are it's the idler pulley. They should be considered a "consumable."

I didn't know that. End of discussion ...

I believe the 2.5L radiator has a conventional radiator cap and the overflow bottle IS an overflow bottle. Fill the bottle 1/3 full with new coolant, fill the radiator right up to the neck, install the cap and drive it.

Gotta disagree, CW. Obama isn't a "polished speaker" at all. Oh, sure, he does fine when he's reading the screen of a teleprompter. But if the teleprompter fails, or when he's on his own like in these debates, he can't string together half a dozen coherent words. Of itself, that might not be terrible. I'm sure there have been decent (if not great) presidents who weren't great orators. The scary part is that as a candidate for President, this man is supposed to be convincing us that he has a "plan" for America. He's been on the campaign trail for six months or more, giving speeches at least once a day, and probably two or maybe three times a day. So why is it that when his teleprompter goes down and he has actually "speak" (as opposed to "read"), he can't even remember what his plan is? To me it says two things: (1) He doesn't have a plan, and (2) He doesn't write his own speeches. Most major politicians to day don't write their own speeches, but they at least have some control over them so they know what they read will reflect what they believe. Obama literally still doesn't know what he's saying when he reads those speeches. He's not telling us anything about who he is or what he believes -- he is only reading empty words that a team of writers puts together to sell their candidate. It's discouraging, is what it is. It isn't limited to the Democrats, either. [Disclaimer] If any of you are old enough to have been following politics when George H. W. Bush (George I) was running for President, some journalist once asked him what his plans were regarding the direction of the country. His response: "Read my lips. I'm going to be President of the United States." In other words, he HAD no plan. His lack-luster, one-term presidency proved that beyond any doubt. With Obama, we would be getting the same thing, wrapped in a Democrat wrapper. I believe they have an expression in Texas for people like this: "All hat and no horse."

Sounds great, but I can reliably report that it hasn't gotten me a job yet. :cry:

I think anywhere "downstream" from the gauges would be a ground anyway, unless I'm visualizing the cluster wiring backwards. You can certainly test the gauges themselves -- hook up a pair of test leads to a 9-volt transistor battery and apply to the terminals of each gauge. They should move. That would show they are still alive. Next thing I think I might try would be to identify the bad wire. Somebody corect me if this WON'T work: Normally, I believe the colored wires in the bundle that plugs into the back of the cluster mostly carry either 12 volts positive, or 12-volts modulated by the variable resistance of the various senders. If one of those conductors has been compromised to ground, you should be able to back-feed it from the cluster end with a test light hooked to the positive terminal of the battery. As long as you touch a wire that's intact, you're not closing a circuit. If you hit a ground wire the light should light. And ... if you hit a wire that's supposed to feed a gauge but the light lights -- that's one to check for being shorted to ground.

Only if you have a clutch-type limited slip (such as the factory optional Trac-Lok).

Well, you obviously fried something -- the question is what? Are you certain you had the charger hooked up correctly when you had it on boost? Whatever you fried must be melted to ground. If you had just overloaded a wire to the point of buring through, it would leave an open circuit. If you're blowing fuses, there's a short circuit directly to ground -- and it has to be upstream from the gauges, because after the gauges ... ground is ground. If you stick your head under the dashboard, can you see any obviously charred wires, or smell any melted plastic type odors?

The picture looks very good for a 20-year old MJ. Whether it's worth the asking price is your decision. If I had it, I'd pay it -- but then I wouldn't drive it in winter, and I sure as aitch-eee-double hockey sticks wouldn't butcher it using it as a trail rig. "Restore" means restore. You can buy MJs out of junkyards for $100 if you want a trail rig.

I have two advertised in the Classifieds right now, and a third that I could be persuaded to part company with for sufficient infusions of legal tender. Where are you located? (Send me a PM if you don't want to "go public.")

When you say "basement," are you referring to a real basement, that you can walk into down a stair and stand up in? Or are you referring to a slab-on-ground foundation? I'd have to see a graphic representation of what you mean by a telepost and beam. If a part of the foundation is shearing off from the rest of the house, I don't think that's likely to correct anything. It might even make things worse. I'm a part-time building inspector and we had a new house a few years ago that DID break off and start downhill. It was before my time so I wasn;t involved, but I have heard the boss mention it. The real solution might by to pump grout in under the foundations. Without knowing more about the specifics of your particular situation I won't try to be any more specific than that. For background, try Google for "mud jacking."

If it's not a 5-cell rechargeable, we don't want to hear about it.

It's never too late. Keep trying ...

If the cluster is coming from a 4.0 and going into a 4.0, then there isnt any adjustments needed. how about a 4.0 going into a 2.5? A tach from a 4.0L going into a 2.5L will have to be adjusted. It will read wrong by a considerable margin. All a tach does is count ignition pulses. On a 6-cylinder engine, one revolution is 3 pulses. On a 4-cylinder engine, one revolution is only 2 pulses. It takes the 4-cylinder 1-1/2 revolutions to generate 3 pulses, but the tach will only show 1, so if the tach says the engine is turning 1,000 RPM, it will actually be turning 1,500. If the tach says 3,000, the actual RPMs will be 4,500.

Check your fluid level? Maybe what you think is "clicking" is the pump cavitating (pumping air).