gogmorgo

This one was a Mazda. I tried messing with the cruise buttons a bunch but eventually had to go through the owner's manual to figure it out, and that menu that was locked out unless you were in park was the only way I could find. It was all kitted out with the automatic everything, warnings going off all the time about traffic around you, so you're almost guaranteed to never notice a warning about a mechanical issue. I had it slam on the brakes unnecessarily once when someone ahead of me turned right and was going to be out of my way by the time I got there so I only took my foot off the gas, although in fairness it did release the brakes immediately once the car was out of the way. Hopefully Pete's folks appreciate the bells and whistles more than mine did. My dad wouldn't even drive the thing.

The rental car I had over Christmas turned it back on every time you started the car, and wouldn’t allow access to the menu to turn it off unless you were stopped and in park. It’s pretty typical for drivers to get waaaay closer than necessary here in Alberta too, but at least they go around at the first opportunity, and don’t even sit behind you at all if they caught up somewhere it’s clear to pass.

Seriously? I HATE radar cruise. You're going up a hill at the speed limit and approaching a slow truck, traffic's going past on the left but there's a gap that will open up right before you get to the truck and so you prepare to signal and move over, hit the gas to match the flow of traffic, but the car slows down on its own and you've missed your gap, now you're stuck crawling up the hill behind a truck at 20mph because you can't merge into 70mph traffic without dropping way back and then by the time you get back up to close to merging speed the passing lane is gone. Or you're driving down an otherwise empty highway at the speed limit, someone comes up behind you and latches on like a limpet, way closer than is necessary. You go faster and they stay stuck, you slow down and they don't go around until you either pull off or basically come to a stop in the middle of the road. Just unnecessary BS that needs to go away.

Not really a permanent tool here, but more of a tip in that this one is now in the scrap metal bin. I was changing a tierod end on one of our trucks and wanted to clean up the threads inside the tie rod, but didn’t have the right size thread chase. I honestly don’t know what the right size even is. So I wire wheeled the old tierod end, and used a cutoff wheel to put some grooves down the length of the threads. Worked a treat. I’ve also done this with bolts when I knew there was a good chance I’d damage a “real” thread chaser. The flat tip on a normal thread chaser isn’t great for especially crusty threaded holes, and the grooves often are small and get packed full pretty quickly, so I’ve cut wedge shapes into the tips of bolts along with much wider grooves for chiseling through bolt holes particularly full of junk and evacuating more of it.

I don’t understand how it got buried, no. But also… Just me, in the daily driver, doing daily driver things.

I definitely wasn't taking pictures during the worst of it. And frankly the lack of visibility wasn't so much of a concern, other than most of the traffic is heavy trucks and not many had more than DRLs on. It might not be obvious from the pictures but where there wasn't snow on the road surface, it was closer to a skating rink than dry pavement, or slush. They use some kind of liquid "salt" on that bit of highway instead of a salt/sand blend (or better yet, nothing), and it's not so effective when the temperature gets much below 0°F. It nucleates some pretty crazy frost. Even with my Hakkas it was slick. No one in the ditches today, but there were trucks spun out on a couple of the hills. It's totally normal road conditions for out here, and I'll drive it without hesitation. It's just really annoying to do so only to find out you have to turn around and go back because someone screwed up your order.

About a year ago my shortbed’s tailpipe fell off, and my muffler’s decided to follow suit. So, a couple weeks ago I randomly checked with one of the parts suppliers we use at work and they had two of the long bed (47605) listed as in stock at two separate warehouses, and one shortbed (46701) so I called and ordered it. I got a phone call back the next day that their warehouse couldn’t find it, but they found another one, it would just take an extra day. I didn’t think too much of that. Normally when I order through them they send it out on their parts run, but apparently they quit coming to my town because of winter road conditions. After doing the 70-mile (one way) drive out there and then back again I can’t really blame them. So then I get there, and they’re training someone new on the till who managed to somehow screw something up that took about 15 minutes to resolve. So by the time they brought my stuff out, I wasn’t looking too close at part numbers. The pipe seemed longer than I expect, but I stuffed it in the ZJ and drove home. Fast forward to last night I go to install it, and… um… Well that ain’t gonna work. Turns out I ended up with the 47605. Oops. I called them back this morning, and they were going to call me back with an ETA on the 46701, but they haven’t yet. They were listing one of each this morning, and their inventory on the 46701 has now dropped to zero. So hopefully I’m getting a call tomorrow or Wednesday saying it arrived. I’m hanging onto the “wrong” one cause i’ll need it soon enough for my long bed. When you can see it, it’s a gorgeous drive through the Rockies, just treacherous. And I’m not super thrilled about having to make it twice.

Compared to the ECE lighting? The SAE/DOT I wouldn’t say is as bright, although that’s a bad way of putting it. The ECE light is much more focused, with a very distinct illuminated spot and not a ton of light outside of that, where the SAE is generally more of a wash across a wider area, with a hot spot in the middle. The ECE is excellent for throwing light far down the road, but the SAE is better for catching eye shine in the ditches. The thing I don’t like about the ECE is the low beams throw so much light up and right to illuminate road signs that it’s difficult to see anything else when there’s a sign reflecting it all back at you, plus I’ve had to aim them pretty far down to stop getting high-beamed by traffic coming around a corner from my right, to the point that the cutoffs to stop glare to my left mean I can’t see much of that side of the road.

Yeah, I’ve really been trying to nail down what’s going on with my vision at night. The most popular “enhancements” have all seemed to make things worse for me. I’ve come to the conclusion that a warm halogen in a DOT housing works with as little interior lighting as I can get away with seems to work best. Somewhat confusingly I’d noticed that the “yellow” settings for the display on an aftermarket stereo I have in the ZJ less straining than some of the others, even though from what I can tell yellow should be more visible. But it’s an RGB led display, so it only simulates yellow by combining green and red wavelengths instead of actually being yellow light. It’s also reassuring to know that there’s an actual reason LED headlights bother me as much as they do. I’ve been noticing though that some of the higher-end LEDs have been shifting towards warmer whites, which theoretically means less blue light glare, and hopefully that will trickle down to the more affordable options too. But we’re getting pretty far off topic.

Most of my night driving is also done in the middle of nowhere, away from city or industrial lighting with lots of large mobile obstacles that wander onto the roads. It's definitely nicer driving the old Jeep where I can dim everything to near zero than some of our newer work fleet with backlit screens. I've also been doing some reading into night vision and come to some completely untested conclusions, the biggest being that true night vision is probably not entirely relevant to night driving. True night vision means you're using only your rods in your eyes, which are most sensitive to blue-green light, and not at all sensitive to red, which is why you don't compromise your night vision with red lights no matter how intense they are. But it doesn't take much light in the yellow to blue ranges to overpower the rods and bleach them out, especially in the blue-green where they're most sensitive, putting you back into mostly daytime vision mode, and based on what I've read I'm pretty sure your own headlights will do that to you. The high-beam indicator that you can't dim definitely does. So then we're talking low-light colour vision for night driving, where pupil dilation is more of a factor to seeing than the colour of the light, and any "background" lighting that's more intense than what you're trying to look at is going to constrict your pupils and make it harder to see. That being said, you're still more sensitive to light in certain colour ranges, amber to yellow in particular, and less sensitive into the red and green and eventually blue range. Everyone has differing sensitivities to colours though, so there's no true one-size-fits-all solution. Red is probably your best bet given it's pretty far outside peak sensitivity for everyone and it's lack of effect on true night vision, but if there's oncoming traffic more than once every 15 minutes, your night vision is unlikely to recover enough for that to be a benefit. Green you'll need to be more careful with as some are pushing into the yellow range and some people have more sensitivity to more green light than others. You have a sensitivity peak again in blue even though you don't have very many cones that can actually see blue light, but it's probably better to avoid blue because it can be harder to focus and lead to more eye strain. I have a vehicle I swapped out the interior lighting with blue LEDS and they kinda feel simultaneously blinding but also too dim to actually see with... but they look cool! White LEDs are typically blue LEDs with a phosphor coating and therefore pretty heavy on blue light and probably not the best. Obviously if you can just dim the dash lights, none of this is relevant. I'm not convinced that PWM dimming is effective here because it seems to give me eye strain. But again everyone's going to have a differing sensitivity to it. Something else I learned during this dive into how lights work that is not at all relevant, other than it being an example of different people having differing sensitivities, there's actual scientific evidence that people with two X chromosomes are more likely to have a fourth type of cone and more range of colour sensitivity than people with a Y chromosome, so guys, your wives could actually be seeing two very different colours sometimes when you think they look close to the same, and there's not a lot you can do about it.

Thinking more about it, slop isn't a great way to describe the way the torsion bar works, because it's twisting, not really having slop. If you turn the steering wheel with the engine off, you can feel it winding up and springing back. Like all springs it is possible for the torsion bar to weaken or fail, in which case it and the steering wheel won't return to the valve centre. One of the other side effects of the torsion bar in there is that when the road steers your wheels you'll feel the push in the steering wheel and push back and correct, possibly even unconsciously, but if the torsion bar fails you don't get that feedback and you'll have to constantly correct what feels like erratic steering wander. There's a loose interlocking fit between the valving parts and the worm shaft that allows the torsion bar to twist and do it's thing but that prevents you from excessively twisting the torsion bar or losing manual steering control if the bar fails. Going back to pushing the steering wheel with the engine off, after the springiness there's a bit of a bump at point where you really start pushing the steering components, which is running into the end of the torsion bar's wiggle room, so to speak. I imagine a torsion bar failure could feel a lot like excessive slop, especially when you're saying it doesn't seem to return to centre, although I don't know for sure I've experienced it firsthand. I also don't actually know how common a problem it is, but when we were rebuilding the steering gearboxes in school our instructors made sure we knew it was a thing that could happen. I don't know if that's part of a typical automotive curriculum, but in the heavy duty world it's still pretty well the only type of steering system in use with only a few exceptions, and the cost of a new gearbox for a heavy truck is still high enough it's worth paying shop rates to have it rebuilt. I was trying to find a picture of the components online, but this is actually a pretty good writeup to learn more about how the whole system works, although my browser doesn't seem to be putting the pictures in the intended locations. https://www.motortrend.com/how-to/power-steering-103

The steering gear needs a small amount of slop to function. There’s a torsion spring between the input and the worm shaft so there will always be a bit of a delay between turning the wheel and the worm shaft starting to move. The valves are on the input side, which allows them to open so you’ll have assist when the gearbox starts moving, otherwise you’d be steering manually to initiate the assist and fighting the assist to stop steering or steer back the other direction. So it’s not going to be possible to ever have zero slop from the input of the steering box to the sector shaft, even if you adjusted the sector shaft backlash to zero.

I’ve been weirded out the odd time by the power/comfort switch getting flipped without my noticing it and everything changes compared to what I was expecting. I’ve also had similar things happen when the fluid was still cold, to the point where it even hangs between gears for a couple seconds. We’re talking pushing -40 and not letting it warm up though, but then I’ve still got the stock heat exchanger in the rad without any additional cooling so I don’t know how it would behave in the cold otherwise. Or how cold it’s been where you are. I’ll also second investigating the TPS. The first signs of it going out for me with the AW4 were that the truck started shifting like I was at wide open throttle.

I'll second Rockauto. I bought my full axle rebuild (including gears) from them, but they're useful even just to look up part numbers to try to source somewhere else. If you're just replacing bearings, all you really need are the bearings, although I'd get a pinion nut and seal. Usually you can get all four bearings plus the seal and nut in a differential rebuild kit. If you're not setting up new gears you'll be able to reuse the existing shims to preserve the current contact pattern. You don't really want the gears to have to break in to a new pattern anyway if you can avoid it. Just make sure any shims or spacers you pull out go back in the exact same place as they were, and keep in mind that depending on who set up your axle they might be pressed on under a bearing cone, or else under the race itself so be careful when pressing things apart. The pinion nut is a distorted-thread lock nut, and they don't necessarily stay lock nuts if you remove and reinstall them, so you definitely want a new nut. It's not unusual for a reused nut to slowly work itself loose after a seal change, and it's also not unusual for people to realize they didn't actually need new pinion bearings and only had to tighten the nut back up. As for the crush spacer for setting pinion bearing preload, you're supposed to use a new one to reset the preload, but the amount of torque on the nut it actually takes to crush it in my experience has been much higher than a typical half-inch drive torque wrench is good for, so you can probably just get away with reusing the existing spacer and torquing the nut to like 225lb-ft. Ideally you'd then measure the rotating torque to make sure it's still within spec. Don't forget to put RTV on the splines for the pinion yoke, or they will leak on you. And make sure all the bearings are coated in oil when it goes together, you don't want to preload them dry.

If you're leaving it idling for extended periods due to the cold, or running in 4x4 a bunch, that'll tank your MPG pretty hard too. 10 is still pretty low, but in winter if I was getting 14mpg out of my 4.0 MJ I was smiling. The engine is coming up to temp, yes?

The factory used thick cast iron spacers for diff bearing preload. When you're building hundreds of thousands of axles, you can make your spacers the correct size, you don't need to stack shims. Sometimes they're under the bearing cone on the carrier, sometimes they're on the outside of the bearing, between the bearing and axle housing.

cruiser54.com if you haven't been there already. Make sure your ignition components are all in good shape, spark plugs, wires, cap and rotor. If you don't know how old they are best to go ahead and change them. There's another recent thread about fuel economy that's worth a skim.

It must have been a pretty big deal back in the day getting custom hats and shirts and things done like that. Before it was all done by computer.

I also stumbled across the person who sold my first MJ to the guy I bought it from. Despite the fact I'd bought it about 60 miles from home, it had belonged to the one of the ladies who worked at the coffee shop a few blocks away from where I was living at the time.

Would the master cylinder section of the firewall have changed for the 4.0? I thought that was just the centre section. Failing finding a matching chunk of firewall, if you figure out where it’s damaged, it shouldn’t be a ton of work to shape something functional out of new metal. Even if it’s just a plate acting as a large washer to spread the load out. Just be careful doing that that you aren’t interfering with spacing or you might affect clutch throw.

Should be able to cut a chunk out of an XJ firewall and weld it into yours.

Looks like paint code PE4, which is in fact Colorado red. Even peeling stickers off a ten year old vehicle when we're surplussing the work fleet there's evidence how the paint's faded from exposure. Even fading just means you haven't left it sitting in the exact same spot for a very extended time.