Eagle

Tenneco is a huge conglomerate that happens to own Monroe and Rancho. If Rusty is calling his shocks "Tenneco," that means he's selling a cheapie Monroe or Rancho and doesn't want you to know it.

Rusty's long arm kit is really booty fab, redneck "engineering." If you want to go that high and use long arms, get Clayton's long arm kit.

Stabilizer is useless on old gas. It can't bring it back to life. Either drive off the old gas, or siphon it out and pour in fresh stuff.

Yes he can. My dealer can, and they all have the same system. He just doesn't want to bother. My dealer's parts guys like old Cherokees and Comanches. They'll check parts for me. The dealer computer parts system will not only tell them what's in the warehouse, it also tells them what's in other dealers' stock. I needed a rear bumper mounting bracket (don't recall which side) awhile back. Discontinued, of course. They found me one at a dealer in Arizona, one in Seattle, and one in New Hampshire. Gave me all three phone numbers and let me make the best deal I could find.

The internal spring is a very (as in VERY) thin, flat sheet metal spring, like on those little froggy clickers we had when I was a kid. Mine broke. No way to repair it. The only fix is to replace the seat belt. The driver's side has a circuit in it to sense when the belt is buckled and sound the warning chime if it isn't buckled. That adds big $$$ to the cost. I snipped the wires off the old belt, short-circuited them together, and just jumpered the warning chime so it never sounds (I always wear the seatbelt anyway, even across a parking lot). The passenger side belt cost about 1/3 what the driver's side would have cost me.

Go Renix, with 24-pound HO injectors.

Gawd! Use smaller pictures next time. Not only do those take forever to load, even with a 19" monitor I have to scroll around to see everything.

John, that overlap is a mixed blessing. Assuming that you are welding from the top, you are leaving an open seam on the bottom, and that's going to attract dirst and moisture -- and in PA, salt in the winter. Before you get the truck back on the road, I strongly suggest you get underneath and seal all those edges with caulk. Otherwise, you'll be practicing your welding skills again in a very short while.

There are so many possibilities regarding DW that I wouldn't know where to start. And there's no agreement among Jeepers. I'm firmly in there with CWLONGSHOT -- something has to set off DW, and IMHO that something is USUALLY tire balance. But once it starts, other factors may play into how badly the problem escalates. I've driven my '88 XJ for thousands of miles with a front tire that was out of balance and would start jumping at 55 MPH -- and I could drive right trhough it until it smoothed out at 65. And I've head DW in the 88 MJ that was so bad at 50 MPH that there was no possibility of even TRYING to drive through it. Caster angle is a big one. You need probably 7 or 8 degrees of caster, but if you're lifting then you have to balance caster angle with pinion angle, and you may have to settle for around 6 degrees and hope for the best. Another point is that DW is a harmonic. The wobble usually starts in one wheel. Sometimes, like with my XJ, it stays there and never becomes DW. It becomes DW when a wobble or shimmy in one wheel is transmitted to the opposite wheel and starts that one shimmying at the same frequency. Why does one vehicle do it and another not? Could be that one has more loose tie rod ends, etc. Could be how well the shocks dampen the oscillations. Could be that the spring rate (coil springs have a natural frequency) happens to coincide with the frequency of the shimmy. Could be warped brake rotors. Start with tire balance. Beyond that, it ain't easy.

I would start by checking the drive gear in the transfer case. It's on the side of the tailshaft (output shaft) housing. The gear is nylon and, as already pointed out, it could have been stripped. Pay attention to the orientation of the hosing (the "quill") that fits into the transfer case to hold the gear. It's eccentric, and it has to be oriented to certain positions depending on how many teeth the gear has. I don't know if this is covered in your Haynes manual.

10-4 and roger that. The problem is that all four of your bolts are concentrated in one small area of the bottom of the frame rail. It's too easy to just rip that right out of the frame with a good yank. The factory brackets have the bolts spead out over a much larger area, plus they go through the frame so the load is taken by both sides of the rail. Sorry if it seems like I'm picking on you, but a tow hook that comes loose from the vehicle is a lethal weapon. Unless you have seen what it will do, you cannot begin to imagine just how destructive it can be. I haven't seen it in person, but I have seen videos. And I used to be a sailor. I've seen what happens when even something as small as a 1/2" anchor line snaps, with nothing on the end. You do NOT want to take any chances on this.

What holds it on, those two puny little bolts? I wouldn't give you a yank with that behind me. Do you have ANY idea how much energy gets stored up in a 20-foot or 30-foot strap? Have you seen the video of the tow hook that got loose and flew THROUGH the widshield and up-raised hood of the vehicle in front? Tow hook attachment is not something to be approached from a "how little can I get away with" mindset. The only way to do it is to start off thinking "Factories obviously do the least they can possibly justify, so how can I make mine 4 times safer than theirs?"

Summit Racing has a Wilwood adjustable proportioning valve. I know people who have used it to restore rear braking in XJs. It should work fine in an MJ, but it would require resetting when you load the bed down. Chrysler has a similar (or the same?) thing in the MOPAR Performance Catalog.

Excellent. Another MJ borg has been assimilated into the collective ...

Thank you. Beat me to it, but that's the answer.

What do you mean by "hard to start"? Are there times when it simply doesn't start or you have to fight with it to get it to go, or does it just crank a bit longer than your 304 did? The Renix EFI system won't fire until it sees that the engine has oil pressure. They always take a few revolutions before they start. This is unlike a good-running AMC V8, that'll usually fire up after about a quarter of a revolution. It takes a bit of getting accustomed to, but it's not a problem.

My condolences, Jeff and Mrs. Jeff. Be safe.

Sheet metal for the floor is probably the only thing you CAN'T weld with an old stick welder. They're fine for heavier stuff, but you probably won't be able to avoid burning through sheet metal. If that's what you want to try, be sure to explain to the guy at the welding supply shop what you'll be welding and have him tell you what sticks to buy, and what power setting to use. Use big sticks and high power and you'll blow right through sheet metal.

FLUX CORE IS NOT MIG!

I was starting to arrive at the same conclusion. The axle is out of an '85. Who knows how many miles are on it or how much it may (or may not) have been abused. There's probably no good way to determine if the axle itself or the inner 'C's are bent short of replacing the ball joints, and even doing the work yourself the ball joints are going to cost $150 to $200. What are these offset sleeves of which you speak? I'm not familiar with them.

How do you "fix it right" after it explodes? How do you "fix it right" when the factory service manual tells you it needs NEW parts each time you adjust it, and those parts are not available?

Add to that that one of us (me) doesn't trust them, since the one in my '88 blew out in a panic stop. If the bladders or glands or whatever are subject to age deterioration, I don't want it back there.

The axle is bolted to the LA assembly at the upper and lower control arm bushings, and the arms are bolted to the chassis at the cross member. Where's the axle going to go? Clayton's Off-Road isn't far from where I live, and in a club I used to belong to I have wheeled with Clayton. His long arm kit was not designed as a kit to be sold -- Clayton is a balls-to-the-walls wheeler and he designed it to stand up to his kind of wheeling. It worked so well that a few people in the club asked him to make them up for their XJs and ZJs, and it kind of took on a life of its own. Although you could make it up yourself, I will strongly urge you to just buy Clayton's kit. I don't think you could possible damage it beyond scraping the paint.

Rocky's advice is pretty good, but he failed to mention something (and, in fact, I think has it confused). The welder may say "MIG" on the cover, but the "IG" part stands for "Inert Gas." If you aren't using it with a shielding gas, you aren't doing MIG welding, you're doing wire welding. To do wire welding without gas, you really need to use flux-core wire ... and you won't get as good a job as you would using plain wire with gas. The problem is that for doing body work, you need a welder that will turn down to a pretty low power. Flux-core wire doesn't work well for body sheet metal -- this is where a decent MIG welder really shines. The Lincoln 135 is an excellent choice. It's the largest welder you can get that runs on 120 volt power. Anything larger needs a dedicated 240 volt outlet. The 135 will do sheet metal all day, handles moderately heavy stuff in one pass, and for really heavy stuff you just make multiple passes. Every Jeep or home owner should have one.

Mate, I don't wish to seem like I'm belaboring the obvious, but ... your toe-in is right on the money, your caster is within spec but not the same on both sides, which it should be, and your camber is WAY out of spec. How much more do you want to check before you fix the things you already know are wrong? Yeah, the camber is only a "little" out of spec -- until you remember that the set-to reading for the camber is zero. Now you're a whole bunch off.