gogmorgo

The clock panel in question is this one: Lights only go dim if they aren't getting enough power (there's something wrong with the wiring) or else there's something obstructing them. How clean are your lenses?

:offtopic: but is it just me, or is there something weird going on with that brake valve?

Rockauto sells the new tanks as well. Going the JY route may not work out so well. Not only is it a crap shoot to find an MJ with a decent tank, lots of yards drain the gas by drilling a hole in the tank.

Did you replace the bulbs with what was installed, or with what they should be? http://comancheclub.com/topic/41500-mj-replacement-light-bulb-list/

When the cobbled-together nastiness that was on my Lada when I bought it finally fell apart (about 1000 miles after I bought the Lada) I pieced together a system with pieces of tubing from the parts store, and clamped it all together. It leaked from about half the connections. I mashed down the clamps with only marginal improvement. I doubled up the clamps for the worst spots, and that helped, but the leaks are slowly getting worse again. I have seen professional shops successfully clamp on mufflers and stuff, so it's possible that I just suck, but there you go. Welding is nearly always better, the exception of course being if your weld looks like this: I mean really? What was even the point of that? ALL the welds on the Niva's exhaust looked like that... any wonder why it fell apart? :doh: So yeah, that exhaust was total junk. I honestly picked up 3 mpg when it fell off. 3! I was also trying to do things on the cheap. :D I'm thinking ditching that... thing... in the middle is why performance improved. Running with only a glasspack makes it sound pretty hillariously awful, and it's pretty loud, but at least I don't need earplugs to drive it any more...

The ones you don't ever want to reuse are torque-to-yield fasteners. Generally speaking, if the torque spec for the bolt is XX ft-lbs + XX°, it means it's a torque-to-yield bolt, which means that you tighten the bolt until it yields; that is, it becomes permanently deformed. I haven't looked up the torque spec for you, but if it's just a straight ft-lbs number, then you should be able to get away with reusing them, provided none of them are stripping, or necking, or otherwise look damaged. It's usually still better to be safer than sorry, though.

To go to duals and stay with similar flow to the stock single-pipe, you'd need to drop exhaust size anyhow. Maybe even as low as 1.75". But still, as keeps being pointed out, not all that much to gain on a stock motor.

Yeah... the Jeep 4.0 is based off an old AMC design. Ford's 4.0 is a V6, not even close to the Jeep inline six. And if you don't know what any of those big words mean, don't ask. If you can't research them with Google, you're too young to know.

Awesome! It's good to know that sometimes the one that gets away might come back around. And welcome to the addiction!

A quick google brought up this: Sounds like a teenager's V6 fwd sedan with a rust-opened downpipe that he thinks makes it cool...

If done correctly, you can get some scavenging and a performance advantage going 6-2-1, vs duals from the collectors back. Splitting again after the muffler won't change much beyond sound unless your muffler is effectively flow-through.

Yup, the horn grounds through the mount, although the OP said his horn works when he jumps it from the battery...

I mean who can fault you for owning a Miata? Everybody's happy to see a Miata. I mean, look at it! It's the best! It's the best! Number 1! It's number 1! It's always number 1! You drive a Miata cause it's the best, and you deserve the best! Relevant: You'd be surprised how not far off the beaten path this is. There's a guy or two on here with an MR2, and at least one guy prepping an MJ as an autocrosser. Cool stuff!

The horn relay on my '91 was dangling loose under my dash when I got it. It looks like it might once have been velcroed to the lower dash panel, but it was also on a bracket with another relay, so I'm not positive... it may simply have been unbolted and never bolted back in. So yeah, two relays together under the driver's side of the dash. Mine was black, not white. Also, even though my relay was bad, that wasn't the entire reason my horn wasn't working. The horn button stuff under the steering wheel lock plate in the steering column has a couple different styles, and they come with different length lock plate springs. Someone had obviously pulled my column apart at some point and put the wrong spring back in. When they couldn't put the lock plate back on, their solution was to pull out the horn cam... yes it "fixed" the problem, but it also removed a part critical to the horn working... idiots. :shake: Obviously the chances of that being your problem are slim, so make sure your relay is working before you start pulling apart your column. But here's a link to my thread from when I was trying to get my horn to work: http://comancheclub.com/topic/40798-horn-button-missing-bits-and-pieces-i-think/

Fixed that for you. Backpressure is a made-up term to explain several phenomena that most people don't understand. Basically what's going on is that a specific exhaust system will flow the largest volume of air at a certain RPM. At that RPM, the air is flowing down the pipe at an ideal velocity that leads to the moving gasses "pulling" the exhaust out of the enigne — the engine doesn't need to work (as hard) to pump the exhaust out. There's also some really cool stuff going on with the gasses cooling off and venturi effects, but that's above the scope of this thread. If you're below that RPM, you don't fill the entire volume of the exhaust with moving gasses and you start getting turbulence which slows it down. You lose the pull, and the engine is now pumping exhaust out. Above that RPM, then you're starting to need to compress the air to get it all down the tube... the engine's pumping again. The other major thing that comes into play is called wave-tuning. Basically the concept is that your engine doesn't emit a constant flow of exhaust like a turbine would, but rather a bunch of pulses. In layman's terms, If they don't sync up, they can run into each other which will slow things down. You don't need to worry about this if you're not looking into doing anything with headers or manifolds, because this mostly has to do with header pipe lengths. What does this mean for the average Joe Schmoe with a pretty well stock motor? Stick to the manufacturer's exhaust diameter. You can play around with mufflers and routing for sound quality and/or looks, because they're not really changing things all that much so long as you don't add anything overly constrictive (i.e. "squish" bending), but frankly the manufacturer picked what they did for a reason. If you spend a good amount of time at higher rpm, it might benifit a small increase in exhaust diameter, but mostly that'll just manifest itself as reduced torque at lower rpm. That said, when/if I ever get around to getting my MJ going again, I'm thinking of doing straight pipe down to just before the rear axle, maybe with a glasspack in there, minimal bends over the axle, and then a Flowmaster 50 series with a single pipe going straight out the back. Not sure yet if I want to do the crossover or keep it all on the driver's side, not sure how it'll work in proximity to the gas tank.

I too have far more money in my MJ than I care to admit... And if things go according to plan, it's only going to get worse. I have all my receipts sitting in a box. I started counting them up, got a third of the way through, and stopped. I've got a decent idea of an approximate total, but I really don't want to KNOW. It would just leave me with unpleasant feelings towards just about everything.

Cats really don't add all that much restriction. A cat is basically a bunch of small tubes that flow the same amount of air as the open pipe does. Sure, there's some turbulence entering and exiting the small tubes, but it's still an unobstructed straight shot through. Pulling a clean (not plugged) cat off a car and replacing with a straight section of pipe won't cause a noticeable change in power.

Aren't the Trabbi's the ones with the bodies that never die? Duraplast or whatever the composite is they used? 2-stroke as well? I've always enjoyed the East-block/Soviet cars. They did seem for the most part to be turds, but there's just so much charm in the simple form-follows-function engineering, the whole not doing more than it says on the box thing, to steal borrow James May's expression. My daily driver is a Lada. Looking forward to seeing more of this one. :thumbsup:

As far as I know, the input end of the transmissions were the same between 2WD and 4x4. The thing about the XJ/MJ is that they were originally designed as 4x4's, and the 2wd ones just "deleted" the 4x4 stuff, so converting from 2WD to 4x4 is simply a matter of bolting on the 4x4 stuff. As such, not all 2wd's stayed that way. This might make them harder to locate, and I'd imagine a 2WD with a manual would be even more difficult. They are out there though. If you can't find one and you can't get the 4x4 bellhousing and stuff to work, you could always just run a 4x4 tranny and tcase with nothing attached to the front yoke on the tcase, although you'd need to shorten your driveshaft. If we knew what area you were in, we might be able to help you come up with a donor... It seems like there are lots of Craigslist experts here, lol. Is that a Florida plate? Forgive me if I'm wrong... I'm Canadian and don't get down that way much at all.

Beyond rear driveshaft length and rear spring perches, the MJ (Comanche) drivetrain options are identical to those found in the XJ (Cherokee). For the sake of us MJ guys, don't go pulling apart a good Comanche when XJ's are a dime a dozen. Any 2wd 4.0 5-speed XJ after '89 or so should have the drivetrain you're looking for. If you plan to keep your own tranny, then you should be able to make a 4x4 model work as well, just swapping over the bellhousing &c. As far as engine management is concerned, OBD2 ('97+) would likely play the most nicely with your dash and stuff in the Dakota, with OBD1 ('91+) probably being the next easiest to make work. I'd avoid the pre-'91 Renix stuff, but there are those who swear by it. As far as physically putting the engine in there, I don't know if anyone here knows enough about Dakotas to be able to help with that. The 4.0 is a fairly long engine, and you might not have enough room between the firewall and radiator for it... remember a straight-six's cylinder bank is two cylinders longer than a V8's.

Maybe this is why I haven't been sleeping so well... I haven't laid eyes on my MJ since October...

I would avoid using sched 40 pipe for structural stuff. Pipe is fairly soft low-grade steel, and 1" sched 40 is only ~1/8th" wall.

Last Christmas I made it from Port Alberni, BC (on Vancouver Island) to Saskatoon, SK, with a one-year-old on board. 27 hours including the ferry crossing. I drove most of the distance. Then my family had to take two legs to make it the 600 odd KM home without me...

Wait till you're hit with the international shipping... There are a few members who've used universal class-III hitches by Reese, available at Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, etc. for under $200, although you may need to drill some holes.

You might be able to find the correct driver for the block drain plug at Princess Auto. Just a suggestion. It's an odd metric square, IIRC. Also, a 50/50 antifreeze is only good down to around -40. I run ~2:1 just in case, and haven't had heat issues.