Eagle

No cutting necessary. I ran 31s with a Trailmaster lift that was somewhere between 3" and 4". I hated the lift and took it out. I can still run the 31s, even at stock height. Without trimming. The key is that you MUST run factory Jeep wheels. They have enough backspacing to allow the tires to stuff inside the fenders. Run aftermarket rims with less backspacing, and the tires will whack the flares when the suspension compresses.

WHAAAAAAAAAAT? Josh -- 3.55s is what Jeep should have used with the 5-speed and stock tires. 31x10.50s and 3.73 gears results in the same final drive ratio as 3.55 gears and stock tires. It's barely adequate for 31s, and 4.10s would be a whole lot better. For 33" tires you need at least 4.10 gears, and you'd be a lot happier (even for a daily driver) with 4.56s.

Ummmmm ... I hesitate to point this out, but y'all DO know, don'tcha, that the self-adjust feature doesn't work worth patooties even when it works at all? You know those little slots on the brake backing plates, beneath and to the front and rear of the wheel cylinders? Those are there, guys, for the sole purpose of adjusting the brakes. You stick a tool called a "brake spoon" into the slot and turn the star adjuster wheel to expand the shoes until they just barely make contact with the shoes. THEN you adjust the parking brake. If the brakes aren't adjusted manually first, you'll never get the self-adjusters to work, even with new wheel cylinders. The self-adjusters are not intended to adjust the brakes, they are intended to maintain] the adjustment once you have set it manually.

In that case, I'd suggest pulling the plug in the "nose" to remove the piston and spring, and clean out all the crud that's likely in there. BE CAREFUL -- the pring is under a LOT of compression, and if you let it go that cap will fly out pretty hard. There's a rubber O-ring toward the back of the piston. You need to ensure that's clean, and the recess it fits into is clean. Keep the O-ring if you want the thing to proportion. If you remove the O-ring and spring, and assemble with the pistol pushed all the way forward into the plug, you'll have full braking power to the rear wheels all the time.

+1 for Logan Steel. And they are (or at least were) open on Saturday mornings for people like us to wander in looking for scrap and asking dumb questions ...

Yep ... what he said ^^^

I wouldn't trust a Dana 35 with anything larger than 31" tires. People have gone larger with the D35, but then it becomes a question of "when" it's going to break rather than "if" it's going to break. If you're on a budget, just get a Chrysler 8.25 from a wrecked XJ and flip the spring pads -- or just move them if you're going high enough that a spring-over gets you to the correct height. It'll be cheaper than the Ford 8.8 and you won't have to adapt anything. You should be able to cut off the stock spring pads and re-use them, but if not you can get the best spring pads available through the Mopar Performance catalog for about $10 a pair.

Okay, then the next question is did you open up the XJ combo valve and clean all to gunk out of the proportioning pistol chamber before you installed it in the MJ?

After talking on the phone with one of my NAXJA mates, it comes back to me that I have actually sold two MJs to NAXJA NAC members. That's really out of character for me, I should be hanging on for dear life.

Yours sounds like the switch on the column. The original question in this thread sounds like the circuit breaker in the dash switch is getting lazy.

Unfortunately, you probably DO have a crossed line. The MJ has two lines to the rear, where the XJ has only one. How did you deal with that? Here's the issue: The XJ combo valve has the line feeding the rear coming out of the fitting at the forward end of the block on the bottom. The XJ combo valve has no fitting in the "nose" -- only the plug for the proportioning piston rod. The MJ has two lines to the rear, one for the normal brakes that runs through the rear proportioning valve, and one that bypasses the rear proportioning valve but is actuated only when the front brake circuit loses pressure. BUT ... the bypass line, which normally is not pressurized, is the one at the bottom of the block. The line coming out of the "nose" of the block is the one that feeds the rear brakes under normal conditions. If you blocked off the line that was in the "nose" and connected up only the line to the forward, bottom fitting on the block ... you effectively disconnected your rear brakes.

That might be the problem, but it's more likely the headlight switch in the dashboard. The headlight circuit doesn't have a fuse, the switch incorporates a built-in circuit breaker. If that gets tired, the additional load created by the high beams (they are typically 55 watts and the low beams are 35 watts) is enough to blow the breaker. After a minute or so it cools down enough to give you lights again -- for a minute or so. Hasn't happened to me in an XJ or MJ yet, but it did happen in my old full-size Cherokee. It got progressively worse, until the night I had to drive home at 10 MPH using only the parking lights.

The cable itself may have broken. Back when mechanical speedometers were the only game in town, JC Whitney used to sell universal cable replacements. They never put something in their catalog that people didn't need ... often.

I don't think there's any difference between the LWB and SWB for hitch mount. I have a hitch on my SWB '87 that I bought used, and I believe (I'm not certain) the seller told me it had been on a LWB. Doesn't make sense they would be different -- they use the factory bumper bracket mounting holes, and the factory didn't have different mounts for the LWB and SWB bumbers.

I'm impressed. Booty-fab to the rescue.

It's far short of a dozen, because the fleet is about half XJs and half MJs. I sold one 86-87-88 SWB to a friend in NAXJA. And I gave that 86 LWB to Detours to model for those rear bumpers that never materialized. :( Lemme see if I can do this from memory: '86 LWB 2.5L 2WD 4-sp '87 SWB Pioneer 4.0L 4WD 5-speed '88 SWB Chief 4.0L 4WD 5-speed '88 SWB SporTruck 2.5L 2WD 4-speed '89 LWB Pioneer 4.0L 2WD 5-speed Dang! I don't think I missed any, and that's not even a half dozen left. I'd better go shopping ...

I keep telling you guys, it's all on Monroe's web site. Now ... bookmark the following: http://www.monroe.com/catalog_lookup/oc ... ppinfo.asp You're looking for a shock with upper and lower mounts that are type L1. For a stock MJ, according to the Monroe listing the compressed length is 12.00" and the extended length is 19.00" XP12 mounts are cross-pins, a la Cherokee, so you can also pick shocks with XP12 mounts and remove the cross pins. Take it from there.

Never yet heard of anyone needing a t-case drop on an MJ. I wouldn't do it.

13 psi minimum at warm idle, 37 to 70 psi above 1600 RPM, according to the factory service manual. Typically, most 4.0Ls in decent condition seem to run between 45 and 55 psi at highway speed.

Fortunately, pictures load so slowly on my dial-up connection that I got the word before I saw the pics. He's not the first -- there's a used car dealer in Rhode Island who has a trailer made the same way -- chopped the entire box and frame off an MJ, welded on a Y-shaped front frame, and it's a really nice trailer. He bought it from someone else, so I didn't have to kill him. Although, come to think of it, he agreed on a price to sell it to me and then backed out on the deal, so his days may have to be numbered after all ... FWIW, the thing in these pictures has an aftermarket split slider rear window. I'm not sure if that side mirror is OEM or not -- I don't recall ever seeing one in black, but they may have existed.

Obviously, the new style dash will bolt into the truck. The problem you face is that in 1991 Chrysler reversed polarity on all the instrumentation, so to swap in the new dash you would also need to change a bunch of sensors AND swap out the body harness -- while maintaing the original ignition/injection harness. Your other option would be to find a late model 4-cylinder XJ with the multi-port injection and swap in the newer ECU and injection along with the dash and body harness. That should get you more horses and equal or better fuel economy.

Your speedometer is mechanical, so the fact it works is irrelevent.

If you go to Monroe's web site, they used to have the entire catalog on-line, and the back of the catalog had a complete listing of shocks by length and end fittings. It might take awhile to scroll through it, but you would take just as long to scan through the paper catalog, since you basically have to look at EVERY listing until you find what you want. I usually scan for length first, and when I see one in the range I'm looking for then I check the attachments. Or you could look for the attachments and then check the length.

It's like Jeep 101 on steroids. Massive quantities of soccer-mom type people who accidently found themselves owning Jeeps and need a controlled environment to pretend they take their "truck" off-road. Lots of people, lots of noisy kids, lots of DaimlerChrysler hype, okay food -- and obscenely expensive for what is, in essence, a day and a half of heavily-controlled trail riding.

I vote for the junkyard motor. It sounds way too nice to part out.