gogmorgo

WJ is a ‘99 to ‘04 Grand Cherokee. Grab a year in the middle of the range and look up lower control arms like you would any other replacement part if you’re wanting to buy new. Or pull them from a junkyard or something if you can find a good used set. But if you’re buying new control arms anyway, 3” is pushing the limit of what you want to run on stock length arms. WJ control arms are the exact same length as stock. They may have a bit of a curve to them that is a little helpful for tire clearance, but the big advantage is really that they don’t have a horizontal lip sticking out to grab your tread blocks. Any aftermarket tubular control arm will do the same. There are probably also some NVH and quality advantages over some of the aftermarket arms, but the stock length arms means you’ll also be screwing with suspension and steering geometry in ways that will negate any NVH improvements.

TCU pinouts are different for ‘91+. There’s a NAXJA thread out in the internet somewhere called “Everything you want to know about the AW4” or similar. Might be linked in the DIY master thread. It’ll go over what you need to do to make different year components work together.

My a/c condenser on my first MJ wasn’t bolted down correctly when I bought it, and eventually it punched a hole in the rad, upper driver’s side, if we’re guessing at damage. Didn’t figure that one out until I was putting the new radiator in. And that job was still one of the easiest things I did when I was first wrenching on things. It went so smoothly I was suspicious of it for years afterwards. The only thing to watch out for, if you have an automatic, is to make sure the trans cooler lines don’t twist on you when you’re removing them from the rad.

Epoxy fixes are a legitimate permanent repair for damage from a rock strike or something. If it’s due to corrosion from the inside of the rad it may not last. That said, swapping a radiator is less than an hour’s job. The only real advantage to changing out other components is you won’t need to drain and refill the coolant later. The more wrenching I do the less I want to touch things that don’t presently have an issue.

Just to add because it hasn’t been done yet, if you’re actually running fog lights and you want them to be legal, they need to be wired to only work when the low beams are on. If you want legal auxiliary driving lights, they must only be able to be switched on when the high beams are on. Not that anyone here has suggested doing so, but you also can’t just stick any old lights on and call them something, they also need to be properly designed to comply with standard beam patterns for the specific light. There’s also requirements for light placement on the vehicle, fogs go lower than the headlights and aux headlights are supposed to be more or less the same height as the primary headlights. Enforcement of lighting standards varies wildly between jurisdictions so there’s a lot of people out there who get away with a lot of things and some people get away with absolutely nothing. But regardless of jurusdiction, ultimately the legality of your lighting system is determined by federal regulations, FMVSS 108 in the US, CMVSS 108 in Canada is effectively the same. Whether it’s because of non-compliant lenses, mounting position, or wiring them to operate them independently from the respective primary headlight beam, any non-compliant lighting needs to be covered at all times to keep the vehicle legal for road use.

Something else that can happen, if a dual-filament bulb doesn’t have a good connection to ground it’ll find a ground path via the other filament. This can result in the other circuit getting illuminated. With a typical incandescent bulb that will mean that when you signal it will dimly blink the tail/marker circuit, and when you turn on the tail lights it’ll dimly turn the turn signals on solid which may be indistinguishable from regular marker/tail light function. LEDs themselves are polarity sensitive, meaning they shouldn’t be able to back feed power into the opposing circuit but depending on the LED some have non-biasing circuitry to allow them to work both ways, and I don’t know how they would be affected in a dual-filament socket without a reliable ground connection. Which, speaking of things I don’t know, this could do with some clarification: As was said, of the three bulbs in the taillight housings, two on each side, should be the same dual-filament 1157 bulbs. Both bulbs function as brake, turn, and tail light bulbs. The dim filament in both bulbs is the tail. The brighter filament in both bulbs will either blink with the turn signals or come on solid when you step on the brakes. You don’t have individual brake and turn bulbs, you have two stop/turn/tail bulbs on each side.

Quick Google of the part number suggests it’s for an Eaton 18-speed. Probably fits a few heavy truck transmissions in the same family if that’s the case. If you sell stuff on eBay you might get a sale but it might be pretty tough to unload locally. Its the sort of thing no one’s really going to be looking for unless they need one, and no one needing one is going to be looking at Craigslist.

I don’t remember a heat shield on mine but that might be a ‘91 thing? I haven’t dug my 2.5 out from under the last couple dumps of snow yet or else I would have looked. Real advice, when you’re going for the manifold nuts, don’t be afraid to come at it from underneath. It really helps to see what you’re doing. Just don’t drop things on your face while you’re down there.

You should be able to see cracks without pulling it off. If you just need to change the gasket you should be able to just unbolt the manifolds and move them away just far enough to scrape the gasket surfaces and slip in a new gasket, without disconnecting too much else. Unless the 2.5 intake is bolted to the power steering pump the way the 4.0’s is, I don’t remember, but that’s a few extra steps if that’s the case.

I’m of a mind that trailers should mostly stop themselves. Tow vehicle shouldn’t be working too hard to stop it sorta deal. I’m curious how a single axle would be with a longer trailer. No stability issues on the road? This is my tow rig. 2004 GMC 2500HD. Base model 6.0 NV4500 4x4. Not the fastest thing out there when towing, but I paid $3000 for it last summer, and it only needed brakes and tires to get it reliable enough, not that it doesn’t still need some stuff, but it did two full trips across western Canada in a week of snowstorms last December when I was moving without skipping a beat. I was planning to sell it again after my move but I kinda like the thing. All the towing capability I need to do and it’s just under the GVWR to need annual inspections here. Beats the crap out of towing with something smaller.

My two concerns with LEDs are dimming and colour temperature. I had a buddy with a big double din head unit with a bunch of blue lights that he couldn’t dim ask me once if I could figure out some brighter headlights for him. I reached out and covered the head unit with both hands and suddenly his headlights weren’t an issue any more. He drove around with a piece of cereal box taped over the head unit after that. Looking cool is nice and all but sometimes being able to see where you’re going is helpful too. Light leaning towards the amber or red end of the spectrum is going to be easier on your eyes at night than a blue or green, or even some yellows. Make sure whatever LEDs you get are compatible with a rheostat. Some want to dim with pulse width modulation and that can get buggy for your eyes.

That’s kinda what happened to most of them unfortunately. Either they got treated as disposable and disposed of, or else they got looked after carefully and theb parked for something like worn brake pads after the parts supply dried up in the late ‘90’s, before the internet really took off. My Niva’s brake drums are aluminum. But they’ve also always come off nicely when I asked. Just because it’s been on my mind recently, Ladapower sells J-hook wiper arms. There are still a few wiper blades out there that’ll fit the 7mm bayonet the Niva uses, but they’re getting pretty tough to track down. I think the last set I bought were Rain-X brand. I had some Bosch sets previously but couldn’t make the last Bosch blades I bought work. The Samara uses 10mm bayonets that really don’t exist anymore outside the eastern block. I ended up chopping up some junk wiper arms and welding the J-hooks onto the factory arms so now I can run any blade. I highly recommend figuring something out like that.

Has anyone actually observed the linkage inverting with the truck in the air? We suggest it every time but having had my truck on a hoist many times I don’t think it’s something that happens as easily as we suggest it does just having the wheels off the ground. My short bed had the linkage flipped when I bought it and even with the truck in the air there was no way I could flip them back around without popping one of the rod ends off. I would put money on it being someone taking it off to pull the diff cover and then putting it back on without noticing the bar and rod are no longer in the same position as they started. Coupled with how no self-adjusting drum brake ever actually self adjusts, it’s pretty easy to see how it could be missed.

Newer end links off a TJ or similar have ball joints at the top that might prevent this, although the TJ links are longer than the XJ/MJ. There was a change in link length during the ‘91 model year. I’m not really sure why, but the links get longer there, although I don’t know that would cause this specific problem if you were putting the wrong length in. I would have said it looked like the sway bar may have been bent inwards rather than outwards. Almost as if a strap got put around the middle of it as a recovery point, between the mounting bushings. When I upgraded to a ZJ sway bar I noticed the newer one was wider in the link area and the old one had a slight kink in the middle. I figured someone must have tugged on it at some point. I don’t remember the end links having too much of an issue, outside of having actually broken one of them, but I wouldn’t have really been looking. Pretty well everything was wore out anyhow.

Make sure the vacuum lines are good from intake manifold to the valve cover. There’a two PCV lines, the one pulls from the valve cover into the intake manifold. The one from the air box is clean replacement air and should be flowing the other way, from air box to valve cover, so if it’s oiling the filter either the other line isn’t sucking properly (leaking or plugged) or else there’s enough blow by to overwhelm the system. If the vacuum lines are all good, if it sat for a while or the maintenance history is questionable you might have some stuck rings that’ll come back if you shoot some penetrating oil down the spark plug holes and let it soak. It’ll smoke like a bastard when you first fire it back up but might reduce your blow by.

Unless you have a specific reason for wanting to disengage the CAD there isn’t much point in spending money and time mounting a cable actuator for it when you can pop the clips off, move the fork over, and clip it back in its new home for free. Any other solution no matter how hillbilly isn’t going to mean anything to anyone other than yourself, as long as it doesn’t somehow interfere with the axle rotating, which would be difficult to do by accident. As long as it holds the fork in the correct position reasonably securely it’s not any more likely to just spontaneously disassemble itself than the factory setup. I won’t say there are absolutely no situations where having a selectable CAD is going to be advantageous, but for most of us we’re just trying to eliminate complexity, and the cable adds more than it removes. Plus you have to look at an ugly handle every time you drive it.

I rolled mine up around cardboard tubes, paper towel rolls I think. It’s not a perfect solution but it works well enough. As long as you roll and unroll them instead of pulling them off the end of the roll and putting a bunch of twists in them.

Are the internals any different? They all use different length wiper blades. That would mean higher current demand to move the longer ones.

Apparently the axles and driveshafts are still under the one at Bucks as of last night. Engine and trans were there too. I have half a mind to run down there on the weekend and likely would if I didn’t need to throw some of my stack of parts onto the Comanche. I could do with a good transmission, getting sick of not having 5th gear on the highway. I’ve got an old one I could rebuild but it’s pretty thrashed, was run out of oil a few times. But like you say just don’t know when I’d get to it. Might be nice to grab the transfer case as well, mine has always made noises I’m not sure it should be making. If you do go full axle swap instead of pulling a shaft it might be good to grab the front diff out of it too. I don’t remember what the exact ratios are but there were a couple options and they’re pretty close together. Something like 3.95 vs 4.05 iirc.

Did you check the front driveshaft for slop in the ujoints or CV? If you grab the middle portion of the CV you shouldn’t be able to move it around while the shaft’s installed. Was the trans mount changed at the same time as the motor mounts?