Eagle

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.

Your camber is fubar. I don't have a '92 FSM but the '94 FSM can't be that far off. The camber spec is zero, with an acceptable range of +1/2 to -3/4 degree. Your camber is way out of spec. The shop that did the alignment should have told you that, and they should have checked the ball joints for excess play. Caster is okay. The set-to spec is 6 degrees, with an acceptable range of 5 to 9 degrees. I would have preferred to see the caster be the same on both sides, though. Again, I don't think the shop did a very complete job for you.

Good luck finding out. The FSM does not give spring rates, so any numbers you see posted are from unofficial sources and therefore suspect. A friend of mine found "220" stamped on the rear leaves off a Cherokee that had a traler tow package, so we believe the heavy-duty XJ rears are 220 pound springs. HD fronts should be in the same range, so maybe around 200? If that's heavy duty, 150 to 160 sounds VERY light for standard duty, except maybe on a 2WD 4-cylinder. I'm going to make a wild guess that MJ rear springs are around 220 to 250 pounds, but that's purely a guess. Best way to find out is to park on a level surface, measure the height to any convenient part of the body on both sides, then put exactly 100 pounds of anything (cement, planting soil, bird seed, anything in bags) directly over the rear axle on both sides. Measure again. If the drop is too small to measure accurately, make it 200 pounds on each side. That should drop you about an inch. Measure carefully, and then making it pounds per inch is a direct proportion.

Those numbers need plusses and minuses in front of them before they mean anything. Assuming your caster angles are plus, they are in the range to provide decent "tracking" but they should be closer to the same. Does the wheel pull to one side? The caster is adjusted by shims in the LCA frame pocket. The shop should know that, and should be prepared to shim the LCAs to get the correct setting, not just set the toe-in and give you a printout. Camber should be zero for both wheels. Either you need ball joints or you have other problems. It's not adjustable, except by using offset ball joints, but it ain't right.

I believe it's caused by a dirty IAC. The TPS may also play into it. I have had it several times on the '88 XJ, which is now up to 266,000+ miles. I've actually never cleaned or serviced either the TPS or the IAC. Whenever the high idle on startup starts to come back, I dump a couple of bottles of injector cleaner into the tank and that seems to cure it for another 6 or 8 months.

Roger - missed that. But the pumps carry the same Bosch p/n. That might very well be, although the HO engine I think runs at a different fuel pressure. Maybe they just use the regulator to control that. The fuel pump itself and the fuel level sending unit are two individual parts, but a lot of places either don't know that or don't tell you when you're ordering.

I'm using a Sun SuperTach II in my '88. Tap the signal off the coil pack. I believe the instructions for my tach said to take it off the wire from the coil to ground, but I don't remember now. It's been in there for four or five years.

The sending unit is definitely NOT the same. The 87-90 version has an ohm range of 0 thru 88. The 91+ sender has a range of 105 thru 5 (that's right, the polarity is reversed as well as the range being slightly different).

Doesn't matter how heavy your springs are. Simple physics. The rear axle is a fulcrum -- put the weight behind the axle and the physics of moment arms tell you that the whole chassis pivots around the rear axle, adding weight at the rear bumper and taking weight off the front tires. The principle is exactly the same as loading a trailer. You want 2/3 of the weight ahead of the axle so you have weight on the tongue, rather than putting the load on the tail and having the tongue always ready to pop off the hitch ball.

Bad idea. Behind the axle will push the back end of the truck down and take weight off the front, which compromises your steering. Put the weight either directly over the rear axle, or slightly ahead of it,. And be sure to strap it in so it won't slide. (There IS a story behind that bit of advice.)

Thank you, that be the one. Yes, definitely pricey, but also definitely VERY high quality stuff.