gogmorgo

I guess this is more of a rant than anything else. There’s businesses I can have stuff sent to just across the border, so I can even take advantage of free lower-48 shipping that way, albeit with a half-day on the road at my end, I’m a little over two hours drive north of the border right now. There’s also businesses that will forward shipments so I don’t have to spend the time driving. But in both cases I’ll end up paying more in import duty (or import brokerage) than I would buying from a retailer bringing in wholesale goods. Mostly it’s just that bringing things across the border is an extra step. Usually it’s not a big deal but sometimes packages get stuck there for weeks, or sometimes your car gets torn apart if you haven’t had a haircut since your last passport or driver’s license picture. If it was just going to be a week or so delay it’s really not that big a deal, I’d expect a week minimum extra shipping time to bring stuff up from the States. But I had a set of lug nuts show up this summer that turned out to be a week out, then a second week out, and when they showed up there were several layers of packaging that made it pretty clear the place I’d ordered them from had just ordered them from a different online store, that had just ordered them from the manufacturer’s online store. They hadn’t even opened the boxes before repackaging, even left the order slips inside. I could’ve just ordered from the manufacturer myself. I know it takes time to process orders, and that’s fine. I’ve also got no issues waiting for something that I know is going to take some time. But I feel like I should know that going into the sale, instead of finding it out nearly a week after paying for it. I’m currently waiting on a bunch of stuff that had a one-month lead per the retailer, but they had a note in the description saying I should contact them about lead times before ordering, which I did do. Then I bought from somewhere else that said they had everything in stock, only to find out two days later it was going to be ten to twelve weeks. So I cancelled and went with the place that was up front about the one-month lead. Although I guess TBD on that, haha, it’s only been two weeks so far.

I’m getting pretty frustrated with online parts stores doing this. Honestly I would prefer to buy locally, but I live in the middle of nowhere in the Great White North, and there aren’t always dealers around, and it’s not worth it for me to make special trips to drive three hours into the city just to place an order for something that I’ll have to come back later to pick up. So I try to buy from Canadian retailers where I can, more to avoid the inconvenience and extra shipping cost and time of shipping things across the border. But this doesn’t just apply to Canadian retailers, I’ve had major American resellers do it to me as well. No mentions of lead times on the website. I can understand not being able to carry everything in inventory, especially things you don’t sell many of. And I can understand a manufacturer making things to order instead of carrying inventory. But when you’re a store that keeps regular inventory of most things, can you not give the customer a heads up prior to them placing the order? I’m almost up to $4,000 in cancelled sales in the last two months. Seems like everything I try to buy I get an email a few days after the fact saying something is going to take up to two months to get. Should I just be rolling over and accepting a huge unexpected delay? I’ve done that in the past and it’s 50/50 on whether the thing is actually going to ship within the estimated time frame, or if the time frame is just going to get extended repeatedly. And it feels like an incredibly dishonest way of doing business. I’m currently waiting until Monday to talk to a retailer that I’ve had good experience with in the past after placing an order on Monday and playing telephone tag all week because I’d ordered to a different address than I typically would have, only to come home to an email today saying everything I ordered was on back order with an estimate of 30-60 days. That’s not cool. Like, I’m okay with waiting a week or so before stuff ships out, but when I filtered by “in stock” on the website and then it’s going to take over a month to get inventory, and it takes you four business days to get around to telling me about it? It wasn’t even anything specific or particularly rare this time, just some XJ front shocks for a 3” lift.

My google-fu is failing me. I’ve been trying to find the GAWR for the D44a in the ZJ. My best guess that would be the upper limit of what a 15” 5x4.5 Jeep alloy from the time frame would be rated for, if you’re wanting an actual number. With factors of safety considered I’m sure it’s not going to cause problems to exceed ratings on occasion, but that doesn’t exactly make it a good idea to get into a habit of it.

I have a hard time seeing Stellantis put out a compact Jeep truck right now. It made sense for AMC to build the Comanche because they had no vehicles in a very popular market segment. They took a small family SUV with good underpinnings for a truck and turned it into one. A traditional drivetrain and solid axles made it excellent off-road. If they were to do the closest thing to that today they’d be building on the Grand Cherokee platform, which is a poor choice. It might attract some midsize truck buyers but Jeeple would rip on it for being IFS and it would compete directly with the Gladiator, which makes it a bad choice to spend money developing. But that’s the closest you’d get to a modern Comanche. As to building a compact truck to compete with the Maverick and Santa Cruz, that would make some sense, except it’s looking like Stellantis is lining up to bring the current Brazilian-market Ram Rampage to North America, which is built on the current Dodge Hornet platform. I have a hard time seeing them rebrand it as a Jeep. It’s not exactly a huge market segment.

Just discovered its possible to mount an NP207 out of an XJ in a divorced configuration. Just got to hack the output shaft off the end of the XJ's transmission and weld it to a driveshaft flange: And then come up with some sketch mounts. And don't forget the shift linkage. This whole thread is pretty sus. It started out just a guy putting XJ axles into a Lada Niva, originally IFS, and just snowballed. Although it is in French. http://nivaventure.free.fr/Texte/Equipements/Ponts_rigides_Jeep/Ponts_rigides_Jeep.htm The Niva is already 4x4 with a divorced tcase so it's not as outlandish as all that in this specific context, but I guess there's no reason this couldn't be done to any rear drive trans... no reason other than good judgement.

I’d be surprised. All the fakes will make it harder to find genuine leaked info if it does exist, and inspire skepticism.

Seriously you guys? This thing is just some Jeep aesthetics photoshopped onto a Maverick. Just for generating ad revenue. There’s a reason no legitimate automotive publications have picked up on this.

Except that number is also irrelevant to precise calculations because different loads and pressures will change the effective radius of the tire. Hence an actual calibration procedure, getting the vehicle set up the way it will normally go down the road, comparing to a known accurate speed readout and correcting from there. Everything else is still going to be just an estimate. Which is totally fine. It’s what manufacturers have to do, which is probably why allowable error on a new vehicle is something like 7% in either direction, if memory serves. But if you’re chasing accuracy you won’t get it by estimating, no matter how close your estimate is going to be.

Unless it’s badly pitted or delaminating I’m not convinced it’s worth paying to replace a windsheild just because of rock chips. Just get them filled asap before they turn into cracks that do require new glass. The dude with the tent in the grocery store parking lot will do them pretty cheap and won’t do any worse than the kid at the glass shop.

I was just working with this on my longbed, although I also just discovered I can’t find winter tires I want to run in a reasonable size anymore and that project has snowballed so far that speedometer calculations have been thrown entirely out the window for the time being But for simple speedometer correction in my case, my speedometer is reading 10% higher than actual speed. So at 100km/h the speedometer indicates 110. The math is the same with MPH but my brain works in metric, as does my speedometer and gps, and speed limits. To confirm that it’s a speedometer ratio error and not a needle that’s slipped on the gauge I’ve also confirmed that when I’m at 50 per GPS my speedometer indicates 55, and at 80 I’m indicating 88. So 110/100=1.1 That’s our correction ratio. So right now I have a 32 tooth speedometer in there. I think. I havent actually pulled it out to confirm, but that’s my memory from when I looked at it ~8 years ago. But assuming it’s a 32 tooth, I would multiply by the correction ratio. 32x1.1=35.2. Then you’re going to have to pick a gear. In this case 35 may seem like the obvious choice. And now my classic overthinking everything kicks in. But in some cases if you’re between gear tooth counts you might want to bias yourself towards the higher tooth count, to help account for tire wear. At least in my own logic. I don’t have a good reference to support that because I haven’t found anywhere else they suggest it as a factor. Statically at least an off-road tire could lose 3% of diameter due to treadwear and still remain perfectly sericeable, which would slow your speedometer down by 3%. Dynamically I don’t know how much treadwear actually affects effective diameter with a loaded tire – I may just be overthinking it… it stands to reason that the tread blocks compress more than the rest of the rubber in a loaded tire so with less tread to squeeze down maybe the effective tire diameter doesn’t actually change all that much over the life of the tire ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I simply don’t know. But the point I’m trying to make is if you do add a 3% reduction in tire diameter to our theoretical ideal speedometer gear tooth count of 35.2 above, you end up with 36.26, so maybe you’d want a 36-tooth speedometer gear instead of the more obvious 35. Maybe it’s not a factor because you don’t plan on wearing the tires past 50% for better used resale value. Maybe you want to just keep things simple and go off a chart instead. 😅

Does it cut out cleanly like the key was switched off, or does it seem like it’s bogging down before it quits? A quick shutdown would indicate a loss of spark, likely an electrical problem. If it seems like it happens with a sudden change in throttle, like when you hit the gas to pull away or come off it to step on the brake, I’d be suspicious of the throttle position sensor. Cruiser54.com has test/adjustment procedures for the TPS as well as other sensors.

The Durango box is a strength upgrade, but at the cost of range of motion. It doesn’t turn quite as far, you’ll have a marginally increased turning radius. Likely won’t be the end of the world, especially if tire rubbing already limits your range of motion. The ZJ box isn’t really a strength upgrade. It just has a quicker ratio, meaning you get more steering angle out of less steering input. It shouldn’t result in a change in turning radius, but you won’t need to turn the steering wheel as many times to go from lock to lock.

My tendency would be to trust Novak over Quadratec, but the other option would be to figure it out on your own. Tire sizes are only nominal and there’s enough variability in effective tire diameters between tire manufacturers and the pressures different people are running that you’re only going to get “close enough” based off someone else’s chart anyhow. None of my Jeeps have even had accurate speedometers with the factory setup, and some of them have been out by as much as 10%. Get the thing put together with the wheels and tires you’re going to run and pressures all set up. Then take it out on a reasonably straight, flat section of highway and use GPS to compare indicated to actual speed, at a few different speeds. Then do the math and figure out what correction factor you’ll need, and pick the new speedometer gear based on that.

Anyone use Milwaukee hand tools? I’ve seen favourable reviews, and ended up getting these at work this summer. Can’t say they were cheap, but they were the fullest set I could find for the price point, and I have been enjoying using them. They feel a little better I would say than my memory of the gear wrench ratcheting sets. I realize they’re still pretty new but I haven’t had any of the ratchets pack up on me, the flex heads have about the right amount of flop, and I don’t know if it’s the gimmicky grooves on the open end or just a nice fit, but the open ends have gripped things I wouldn’t have expected them to grab, rusty fasteners and such. Also the organizer they came in is pretty nice. Whether deliberate or not the metric and SAE sets nest very nicely into a tool box drawer where they don’t slide around, with all the wrenches facing the same direction and sitting flat enough not to jam up. And while they clip into the organizer it doesn’t take huge amounts of force to pop them in or out, so you’re not disrupting the rest of the set when you pick them up. All in all just seems like a really nice quality product. I’ve been thinking about picking up a Milwaukee socket set. I’m intrigued by the square drive ends that aren’t supposed to want to roll away on you. The Stanley set I’ve had over ten years that’s done most of my work at home is maybe getting a little long in the tooth.

Well I put it back together and everything is working alright, got about 100 miles on it. But that high beam stalk still isn’t quite as snappy as the one in my other MJ, still has some mush to the movement. Oh well, at least it switches reliably now. But I did some recollecting and went for a deep dive. And as always, CC to the rescue, courtesy of nine-years-and-eleven-months-ago-me. That pin was in fact missing. Makes me want to do a better job of documenting the rest of my repairs. Can’t think I ever would have imagined back then that I’d be looking back at that thread for my own benefit ten years later. Also holy crap I’ve had this truck a long time.

Are you wanting to avoid losing time on clocks and such? I've never had an issue with mine draining batteries when they sit for a month or two at a time. I've also thought about a solar maintainer, but they're a lot more money than one of these guys: My other concern is I'd mostly want them to prevent batteries from freezing over winter, but if it's going to turn into a drain any time the thing isn't charging, like during 18-hour nights or when there's snow on the thing, it would sorta defeat the point. We disconnect batteries and leave them sit outside over winter on half our work fleet, and I haven't noticed any trends of reduced battery life on the seasonal fleet.

I had a few places tell me they were out of stock, discontinued, but then one shop the guy thought to himself it couldn’t possibly be true because there’s so many XJs still out there and looked it up by dimensions rather than application and found one. I guess the distributor had updated their part numbers but not the catalogue. Don’t know if that would apply in your situation or not.

So those who’ve done it know I’ve been reasonably deep into the steering column. During disassembly I had a copper.. cylinder thing come out. Can’t for the life of me figure out where from. Other than maybe a horn contact button for the turn signal switch that got left in there during a previous repair maybe? The back is hollow like a spring or another pin would go inside it. I know I had an interesting time correcting some mistakes someone else made in there a while back, the whole horn cam was missing from the truck when I bought it. But it’s pushing ten years since I was in there to remember what all was missing. I’ve pulled far too many machines apart in between for that… And even if I stuff it all back together and everything works, this is going to bug me. And more because I want to b*@ch about it than anything else. This steering column is dumb. The wiper switch worked just fine as a wiper switch. I only had to change it out because my high beams didn’t want to switch. Because the plastic wiper switch body cracked and couldn’t get quite enough movement out of the other little plastic bit that pushes on the rod that actuates the dimmer switch. Mechanical linkages to actuate electrical components is just so 1960’s. Also if anyone knows a source for new linkage parts I’d be interested. The plastic bit between the wiper switch and dimmer switch rod has a pretty deep groove worn into the end of it, and of course there would never be another one included with the wiper switch.

Even BC’s winter tire mandate is a joke. They’ll consider anything M+S with 3.5mm of tread as a winter tire… which is pretty much anything that’s not bald or a street-legal track tire. Alberta’s the Wild West, they don’t care what tires you run, don’t even prohibit studs in the summer.

Funny story, winter before last I caught up to an early 2000’s half ton Chev doing about 40km/h westbound through Robson park, crossing into BC along highway 16. The road wasn’t great, but I didn’t think it was that bad, and other than visibility in a few spots I didn’t feel the need to slow down much at all. I grabbed lunch in Valemount, and just as I was about to leave the same truck pulled into town and parked next to me. I happened to notice he was on Motomaster Total Terrains. I didn’t get the impression they were much good for winter use, even if BC would consider them a legal winter tire. But more to the point and back on topic, I happen to have a couple of the Grabber AT2’s that rubbed still kicking around as spares, the one not on the truck. It’s about 1/4” wider in the tread area than the Hercules Terra Trac. They’re both mounted to the same OE Jeep wheels, although the Grabber doesn’t have the weight of the truck on it. The AT2 has a much more square shaped shoulder to it than the Hercules. I don’t think either tire is still available. I would have bought the Grabbers in 2012 I think and the Hercules replaced them in 2017. Not really by choice, I ran over an animal carcass on the highway and had chunks of bone poking through the sidewalls of both driver’s side tires. Had to put the spare on the front and somehow the bone pieces held the air in the back tire long enough to make it to a shop. Slim pickings for in-stock tires on Saturday of Easter weekend in Moose Jaw.

Depends on the tire. My Grabber AT2’s rubbed at full lock, my Terra Trac II’s don’t. Same size, same truck, same control arms. It’s the tires with shoulder and sidewall tread that’ll do it to you. Also tire widths are only nominal. Some manufacturers will make their tires wider than others.

Aggressive tires in a 235/75R15 may still rub the shoulder lugs on the lower control arms. But a highway-focussed tire should be fine.

‘91 absolutely does not have a cable driven speedometer. Source: I have two of them sitting outside in both 2.5 and 4.0 flavours.