gogmorgo

Wood stove would be nice right about now. Went from no snow to all of it in the last couple days, and it’s still coming. Ski hill actually bumped their opening day back up by one, and I’m pretty psyched. It’s enough we’re already closing highways for avalanche control.

Have you checked the a/c vent tube? If it’s plugged you’ll get water out of the heater vents.

JustJeeps.com has them listed on their site already, for anyone looking for a Canadian supplier, as the eBay listing lists it won't ship to Canada. https://www.justjeeps.com/keyparts-rear-upper-wheel-arch-for-86-92-jeep-comanche-mj-0482mj.html I imagine others will have them posted soon, this is just the first I've seen. They also list the Key Parts rocker panels, and XJ floorpans.

Nah. Can’t go skiing without snow. Our local hill had to postpone opening for a week because they haven’t had enough. This is all we’ve had so far at valley bottom this year. They’ve had a little more at the base of the ski hill, roughly 2000’ higher, but not by much… they’ve been snowmaking ‘round the clock for the last two weeks and still not enough. And we’re pretty well only at minimum ice thicknesses too now for pond skating. Usually we get a good month of skating before ski season.

I personally don’t back up anything other than contacts to the cloud. I just don’t really need to be burning through data to do that, and I’m not convinced the cloud will always be there when I need to get at something. My phone is supposed to be backing up to my desktop over wifi when I plug it in at night, but I’ve had things happen where I missed the wrong update, or my desktop got powered off because I rarely use it, where I went a few months with no backup, and I did once lose a couple months worth of pictures. But it’s better than losing everything.

A friend of mine picked up a 2015 Corolla with ~20,000 miles on it this summer off a dealer lot, right around $10k after the exchange rate. Base model with a stick shift, they just couldn’t move it. Automatics on the lot were going for about 50-70% more with three or four times the mileage. Nothing super fancy going on, just cruise and a/c, but in my mind you don’t really need much more than that.

You can’t copy and paste a link?

A lot of people would prefer to build from new steel instead of trying to reform the twisted metal that is there. If it stretched the steel it’s going to need real finess to shrink it back again and get it back to the correct shape. If your only goal is to make the taillight fit again then sure, you can get behind it and push it out, or weld studs to it and pull it out with a slide hammer. But if you pull or push on the wrong part of it, you can make more work for someone who has to go in and correct all your hammer marks as well as the original damage. My experience pushing dents out from behind on our fleet trucks is that it usually just results in a bump inside the dent. There’s almost never enough clearance on the inside to push the dents out properly.

Yeah I saw that hit the yard. It’s $#!&ty. There aren’t very many clean MJs up here either. But the Calgary Jeep guys will have picked the good parts off it and put them to good use long before it hits the crusher.

Lots of pictures all joined up together: These guys have been going at it on and off all morning. Makes a guy a little nervous. If we zoom out a little…

Pretty well goes for most of the trash on Amazon.

Nice.

Thinking about this a little more, the valve shuttles when there’s less pressure in the front brake circuit than in the rear. This is why opening a front bleeder will shuttle it. So keeping that in mind, if you open a rear bleeder instead and stomp the brakes, the higher front pressure should force it back. This would happen as part of the normal bleeding process when you’re bleeding out the rear after bleeding the bypass. When you say you tested the calliper and soft line for flow, how exactly did you do that? Because to me that means you pulled the line off the calliper and pushed the brakes and it squirted fluid, then you put it back on, opened the bleed screw, pushed the brakes, and got fluid out. Which is contradictory to the issue you’re having. Usually when checking for a blocked line, I would start at where the line beaches off from the known unobstructed lines (I.e. lines to other brakes where you get fluid out of the bleeders) and carefully crack each connection down the line to see where I stop getting fluid pushing out, although in the case of the brakes, I would start at the calliper and work my way back up. If you think the distribution valve is obstructed, remove it, disassemble it, and clean it out. It’s more than possible some junk that had collected at the bottom of the reservoir over time got pushed into the system while you were bleeding.

Nah, the later VM Motori 2.5 diesels sold in Europe were also an entirely different beast from the AMC 2.5. It takes a little more than just a bore and stroke change to make a gas engine run on diesel. I have a hard time imagining the 2.1 being truly useless. Slow, sure, but as best I can tell torque would be roughly comparable with the AMC 2.5. 86hp may not seem like a lot, but remember it’s a low-revving diesel engine, gas engines don’t make a ton of hp either of you don’t rev them last 2500rpm.

The strainer pretty well plugs directly onto the bottom of the pump, which I guess could be enough to call it a pickup kit. Which thread are you referencing? Bosch is definitely the go-to brand around here, for good reason. I’d recommend for sure getting all parts from the same manufacturer for a chance at compatibility. You’d only need to replace the lock ring if it was damaged, which is possible, depending on removal technique. The seal is just an o-ring, and it should come with the fuel pump.

Reading the reviews it seems like quality is hit or miss on that flasher. The description also doesn’t give huge amounts of confidence. A couple people in the reviews say it behaves like a standard thermal relay. Looks like it’s just got a capacitor that charges and discharges instead of a proper electronic timer. An electronic flasher relay will work with any kind of lights, or any combination.

MJ bleed procedure is to start by bleeding the rear with one of the front bleeders open, then closing the front bleeder, bleeding the back again, then the front. I'm with Pete, if it's an issue with the shuttle valve in the distribution block, it'll affect both front callipers, not just the one side, and I can't imagine an open, unobstructed bleed screw would be any different than an open brake line. Did you try pulling the bleed screw out entirely? Most replacement callipers come with plugs in the port for the brake hose, and it could cause interesting issues if it was left in and possibly pushed into the calliper. I can't think of any non-catastrophic way a calliper could fail that would obstruct the bleed passage, short of it being plugged with something.

Yeah, it’s not just young guys. When I was in my early 20’s, I actually spoke on the phone with a guy about a car he was selling, told him I would show up with a trailer to buy it, he knew when I was going to get there and that I was coming from 200 miles away, and we both had each other’s phone number. So I go and borrow the truck, rent the trailer, make the drive and knock on his door, and he tells me he already sold it to someone else and closes the door in my face. Guy looked like he was in his 40’s, and didn’t even bother trying to get in touch, didn’t care that I came so far. I ended up buying my first Comanche instead that summer, and I don’t know I actually needed a rough as hell ‘81 Firebird at the time so I guess it did work out, but it still burns thinking about it. I suppose it could’ve been that he just didn’t want to sell it to some dumb kid, but that’s another rant for a different thread. I personally have a mental health condition that leads to me seeing something shiny and totally blanking on a conversation I was having and going off and doing something else completely unrelated, sometimes for weeks before I remember about it. But I usually try to pick up the conversation again or at least apologize when I realize I did it.

Yeah, you're going to want one from a Renix era XJ. They do exist, but yeah, they are fairly rare. It looks like Novak can sell you a 21 spline input gear to swap into a later XJ 242. Just make sure if you go that route that you're getting the correct input gear, as they changed the tooth cut at some point... I don't know exactly when. As to other sources of the NP242: https://www.naxja.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1138623

Always fully charge a battery before putting it in storage, and then disconnect it. Especially if it's likely to see freezing temperatures. Keeping it charged is what keeps the acid in the acid, otherwise it's just water in there, and water freezes, expands, and cracks batteries, which is what makes them leak. Modern cars especially with keyless entry and push button start that are constantly scanning for the fob in your pocket will discharge a battery enough to freeze it in less than a month.