Eagle

If it was hit hard enough to mangle the front axle, you'll want to check to be sure the front of the crankshaft wasn't hit hard enough to damage the engine, and you'll also want to check the front unibody extension rails to be sure they haven't been bent out of position. Your best solution for parts is to buy a beater XJ of similar vintage, take what you need, and sell the remaining parts to recoup the cost of the donor vehicle.

The fuel pump ballast resistor isn't necessary, it's only to make the fuel pump run quieter. The 87s don't have it. Which means for diagnostic purposes you can just jumper the two wires together. If it starts and stays running, you've identified the problem. Since you changed the air filter, there's a good chance you may have whacked that thing without realizing it.

You'll also need to drill and tap a hole in the back corner of the head for the temperature sender. The 99 sender in the thermostat housing sends data to the PCM and the gauges pull their data from the data bus. The '91 gauge is driven directly by the sensor in the head.

That's the correct plate. The paint code is two letters and a number. Colorado Red, for example, I think is PE9 (going from memory).

Chrysler dropped the vacuum disconnect beginning in either 91 or 92, so any XJ or MJ 231 t-case from 92 and newer will be free of the vacuum switch.

I'd feel a lot more confidence if they could spell "enclosure" correctly on their web site. Sheesh!

Your '87 has the Renix throttle-body injection. Anything for '91 and newer will be set up for the Chrysler multi-port injection. The basic short block *should* be the same, but externals and manifolds will be different.

My point was that they stopped using the rocking chair seats in the XJ around 1989 or 1990. Chrysler didn't want to spend the money. I think any XJ bucket out of a '90 or newer (maybe '91) that doesn't have the rocking chair option will be a better fit.

????? I didn't know there was an '88 Eliminator. I thought that didn't show up until 1990.

If you look closely at the diagrams Pete posted, you'll see that the XJ "curved" seat base (the one used with the "rocking chair" option") has a shoter pedestal than the one for the "straight" XJ seat. I need to confirm with some actual seats, but I think that means if you put a rocking chair seat onto an MJ pedestal and keep the rocker mechanism, you're going to have a seat that's several inches too high. Either get XJ seats out of a vehicle that doesn't have the rocking chair bases, or remove the seat from the rocking chair and mount it directly to the tracks.

What about doing the page(s) in Microsoft Word and then choosing "Save As HTML"? I've never used that to actually create a web page, but the option is there and should work for simple pages w/o frames or complicated content.

It's really pretty simple. If you have an 86 with any engine, or an 87 or newer 4-cyl, the 4-speed is an AX-4 and the 5-speed is an AX-5. For the 4.0L engine, 87 thru mid-89 is the Peugeot BA10/5, and mid-89 thru 92 is the AX-15. If you have an '89, the BA10/5 case splits lengthwise along the vertical centerline, so look for a line of bolts along the centerline on the bottom holding the two halves together. The AX-15 has a front section, a short middle section, and a tail section.

Can't be adjusted in the truck. The "linkage" isn't an external, like the old 60's vintage muscle cars with their Hurst shifters. The shift handle goes into the top of the tranny and any adjustment has to be made internally (and I don't even know if there is any "adjustment" possible, other than assembling it correctly).

The fact that the synchro "burned out" should be a clue. A synchronizer is not a clutch, and it can't "burn out." It's a splined collar that slides onto a splined shaft, much the way the front axle disconnect works. If a syncro failed in a freshly rebuit tranny, it's most likely because the linkage isn't adjusted correctly and the synchro is not engaging fully. That would initially put extra stress on whatever percentage of the splines ARE engaging (meaning what percentage of the length, not how many), and as the stress begins to wear at them, that's when it begins to pop out of gear.

Remember it's a 4-stroke engine. Each cylinder hits TDC once on the compression stroke, and again on the exhaust stroke. Are you certain you had #1 on the compression stroke when you set up the distributor? If it was on exhaust, the distributor is 180 degrees out of synch.

The window riser is a fiber cable wound with wire that engages the crank. After awhile the wire spreads and the crank can no longer engage. The solution is to replace the riser.

But the XJ 4-bangers didn't get the AW4 at all, and I don't know if the MJs all got it. When I asked the parts guy at my dealership about the bell housing, he didn't believe me that it might exist until he looked. This is a good parts man at a good Jeep dealer, where virtually all of the techs and parts guys drive some kind of Jeep. For Todd to never have heard of it suggests that it was a rather rare bird. So ... this is why I wrote about good luck expecting a yard to know what tranny is behind a 4-cyl MJ. Most of them are going to be Chrysler 904/999s. If they say they have what you need, make sure they go back and triple check that the tranny is an AW4 before you give 'em your credit card info.

There was a bell housing to mount the AW4 to the 2.5L engine, but it was discontinued many years ago. Junkyard is your only hope, and good luck trying to find a junkyard that would know what tranny was in a 2.5L MJ.

Dunno about the uppers, but the WJ lowers are wider at the bushing than the XJ/TJ/ZJ. Length is okay but you'll have to file or mill the ends of the bushings and sleeves to get 'em small enough to fit the MJ pockets.

The Dana 44 was the axle used with the optional Metric Ton package from 1987 thru 1992. That was a function of weight capacity, not 2WD vs. 4WD. Dunno what the chances are of finding one, but it's theoretically possible.

Not super difficult, but difficult to accomplish without trashing the arms. The bushings are a press fit, and the arm is (as you must already know) a 3-sided stamping of heavy-gauge sheet metal. To not destroy the arms, you NEED a spacer that's the exact thickness of the space between the two sides of the arm. Without that, if you don't trash the arm getting the old bushing out, you will trash it getting the new bushings in. If you buy compete arms from Crown or Quadratec, you won't pay much more than the bushings will cost you at NAPA.

Spray it with silicone spray before inserting it into the hole. Makes it a lot more slippery.

To follow up on an idea I tossed at Pete after he got this under control, this forum software doesn't have the best security features in the universe (duh!). An awful lot of sites seem to be happy with vBulletin (that's the one used by NAXJA and something like 500 or so other forums around the Internet). You have to buy or rent vBulletin, but it isn't that expensive. I'd be willing to send Pete a few bucks to buy a copy if he wants to migrate to vBulletin. How do other folks feel about that? This is a new idea, so we need to investigate if we'd be able to migrate the existing psosts & threads over, or if we would have to keep this forum on-line as an archive for the old information. First things first: how many agree that vBulletin would be an improvement, and how many would be willing to chip in to buy a copy?

Send me a PM with your e-mail address, and I'll send you an Excel spreadsheet that will tell you more about tire sizes and gear ratios than you want to know. The short answer is that, for stock tires, 3.54 is the optimum ratio. The 5-speeds came with 3.07s, but they are geared so tall that 5th gear isn't usable except on the highway, and even at 55 you're well below the torque peak of the engine. 3.54s are a better balanced choice.

i was starting to wonder if anyone would notice that. now if that is the real problem or not it is hard to tell without being around the truck to see what else it might be i think. Alex Well, at least I read the symptoms correctly. So what if it was the engine that was swapped rather than the tach? By the way -- the '88 tach is adjustable. Take out the gauge cluster and look at the back of the tach. You should see a potentiometer. In rough terms, all the way to one side is the 4-cyl setting and all the way to the other side is for 6-cylinders. If you have access to a good idle tach or a professional scanner machine you can fine tune it, but just turning the pot to the opposite end of the range from where it is now will put you in the ball park. I don't know if your '87 tach is the later style, like the '88 and adjustable, or the early style (like the '86) and non-adjustable. You'll have to look at the back of it to see if it has a potentiometer.