gogmorgo

Just one thing to think about that I don’t know if it’s been brought up, you want to be careful increasing the bulb wattage. I don’t know what the wire gauge is on the harness as it’s not listed in the ad. Going through the questions one guy said 14, another said 16. What I do know is the relays are only rated at 30A apiece, meaning there’s no way the harness can support the 80A the ad claims, as you’ll only ever be running through one relay at a time. Two 14awg wires will match the 30A limit, but if it’s 16awg you’re looking at a 20A limit (10A per bulb). You’ll be fine running 80W bulbs on it regardless, but 100W is the most I would want to run on a 16awg wire if you’re looking at upgrading again in the future. 100W is probably excessive on the road anyhow, but something to keep in mind.

Probably inspired by this thread, I just picked up a set of these: https://www.rampageproducts.com/rampage-5089927-headlight-conversion-kit Choice mostly came down to being able to find them from a Canadian supplier. ECE headlights are fully legal up here, and unfortunately that’s what most of the H4 “upgrades” are... and I’ve already given my thoughts on those. I’ll have to post an update/review once I’ve got them installed.

There’s a few different styles: http://colorado4wheel.com/images/jeepwheels/xjwheels.html This is my ‘91 short bed with base ZJ wheels on it. 99% sure it’s the same as the mj/xj “base 2”, just with a painted centre cap.

Lots of other way it could be contracted, too. I’m still seeing lots of masks on chins, exposed noses, and poor hand hygiene practises out in public. My work hired on extra staff to go around sanitizing high-touch surfaces, on top of the mask requirement and working from home where possible. Unfortunately my department can’t exactly work from home.

A multimeter is very useful, and should definitely be in your toolbox, although you should be able to diagnose this easily enough with a test light. Start by turning on the lights and checking for power to one of the bulb sockets. I’d start with the passenger side marker light because it’s easy to get at and single-filament. Test between the negative battery terminal and the contacts in the bulb socket. When you touch one contact, the test light should come on nice and bright, or else you should be seeing pretty near battery voltage, and you shouldn’t see anything at the other contact. If it’s good move on to the ground side. Test between the positive battery terminal and the other contact. Again, the test light should come on nice and strong or else you should see near battery voltage. My guess is there’s a grounding issue because it affects multiple circuits, but you don’t know that without testing. This is where the circuit diagrams become useful. Once you’ve isolated the issue, you start narrowing in on it. The first place I would look is the header panel harness connector, located under the airbox. Both power and ground go through it. If you live anywhere that sees salt, there’s a good chance it’s got some corrosion issues. If everything looks good inside, you can then use the wiring diagrams to make sure you’ve got good power and ground where it’s supposed to be at the connector, and if you do, then you’ve narrowed the problem down to the header panel harness. If it’s a power supply issue, remember that the taillights should come on with the parking lights. If they don’t, I’d suspect the headlight switch, it’s a common issue.

Like was said, gear setup is unecessary if you’re only doing bearings and seals. Just keep track of where everything was, and put it all back exactly. You’ll want a press for the bearings, but all you should need to pop the carrier out is a prybar, maybe a rubber mallet to put it back in. Clean the case out really well so you don’t have chunks of bearing material floating around in there. Take a good look at the spider gears too. They like to wear out, lose chunks, etc., and they make a good excuse to put something fancier in there. It probably goes without saying, but isn’t something you want to put off. If the pinion is loose and bouncing around it will wear a funky pattern into the gears and you could find yourself needing gears not too long down the road if you take care of it. I say this because it’s a thing I put off until I had time for a bigger job and then found myself needing to tear into it again within 3000 miles, this time to change everything.

What’s wrong with the wiring harness, beyond it being 30 years old?

Do you absolutely need to flat tow it? It can be done, but it’s better not to if avoidable. Disconnect and secure the rear driveshaft for best results. You may get away with leaving a 2wd in neutral although there is a small risk it could hit a bump and pop into gear, which may have undesirable results. With a 4x4 you can put the transfer case in neutral, but if you’ve got a CAD front axle you want it unlocked, as the transfer case will leave the driveshafts locked together so if the CAD has been permanently locked in or there‘s a single-piece shaft in place of the two-piece, you’ll essentially be dragging it down the road in 4x4. Also make sure your tow vehicle is good for that much weight unbraked. For a stock truck you’re looking at between 3000 and 3500lbs.

Progress on this? Just changed out an axle ujoint on my ZJ. I did it at work and didn’t realize how worn out my 13mm 12-point socket was until today. Ended up rounding off two of the three hub bolts. Almost seemed like that was the first time anything in there had been apart. A 5/8UNC nut was a pretty good fit over the stripped bolt head, and once it was tacked on it gave a breaker bar enough grip to back them out. If you’re struggling to get the hub out of the knuckle, try threading the hub bolts back in a ways, but not all the way snug. Then you can beat on the already buggered up bolt heads with a hammer to knock the hub out.

Definitely do it in that order. I got one “to drive around” while I was building up my first one... and now I’ve got two project MJs.

I like the aspect that it’s something unusual but that doesn’t really stand out unless you know what you’re looking at. To most people it’s just an old truck, nothing special, so I don’t have to play the million question game every time I stop for gas. The ZJ is great for that, cause it’s “just” a ZJ, but no one else is driving one with a stick. The Ladas on the other hand are the exact opposite. Up here it’s not so bad because Canadians are usually polite enough to either leave me alone, or at least ask the question, listen to my answer, and then leave me alone. Driving through the States on the other hand, especially the further south I get, it’s almost every other gas station, it’s the same 20 questions, and almost no one listens to the answers and walks away calling it a BWA because they saw ВША on the wheels, so it’s mostly just an obnoxious waste of my time... but I’m ranting. I also like the fact it’s a stout little truck that hits far above its weight class and fits pretty well everywhere I want to put it, and everything on it that could go wrong is pretty easily dealt with, and everything is pretty straightforward to fix. It’s also a pretty good looking little truck. It’s got a “tough” look without being butt ugly or looking like a Pokémon, but it’s not agressive, not dopey, not overly happy, and the proportions are pretty good. I guess it comes down to it being a truck build to be a truck without pretending to be anything else.

The ring gear splash lubes everything. If you’ve still got the cover off, you should be able to find some passages above and below the axle tubes to splash oil in and drain it back out. This is a great visual of a ring gear splashing around the oil, also a great series in general talking about diff covers:

A few members have reported getting a couple inches lift out of the General “stock height” springs. If you can find a spring shop somewhat local to you, they should be able to help you out. There’s a place in the city here that builds springs for us at work that come out cheaper than getting new springs from the parts store/dealer, although shipping a set of springs down to you from the land of polar bears would be murder.

The newer factory studded tires claim this is less of an issue now. Something about pockets of softer rubber or even air under the studs means they push back up into the tire more, keeping rubber in contact with the road surface. I just ordered a set of Hakka 9’s for my ZJ. They’re supposed to have two different shapes of studs in them as well, one down the middle of the tire for acceleration and braking, and a different shape on the outside for cornering. Fancy stuff. Gotta watch this though. Last winter we had a cold front come in and dump about 18” of snow. The municipality plows it all to the centre, then comes by the next day and hauls it all away. So in my infinite wisdom on my commute that morning, instead of turning right out of my driveway and going the “long” way to work (might’ve added 30 seconds) I decided to turn left and smash through the berm. Except when I say cold front, I mean cold. It was -45°C that morning, so that berm may as well have been concrete. I hit it hard enough to push the front wheels up and over, and landed hard high-centred on top of it, with the rear axle dangling in the air. Fortunately a buddy drove past a couple minutes later while I was trying to jack up the back end to chisel out the berm, and was able to drag me back off of it.

I just had it happen to me. Photo was the right way around in my library but uploaded upside down. I deleted it from the post, went into my photos, edited it, rotated it 360° (4x 90°), saved it, tried to upload again and it uploaded correctly. I’ve done it a few times in the past. I suspect there’s a bug in iOS. It knows what angle your phone was at when you took the picture, and it may be confusing that data with the rotation flag when you upload. Any time I’ve had to go back in and manually zero the rotation to upload something here, the crop/rotate pane in the editor tries to automatically straighten the photo from some wonky angle. It doesn’t do that though on photos that show up in the library upside down. I’m pretty sure that’s just because I took it at a wonky angle (usually flat like if it’s a page out of a book) and I didn’t catch that the phone incorrectly guessed which way was up.

Come up to Alberta. It would be nice to have either paint or cab corners, rockers, and floors. My shortbed has none of the above.

https://blog.suretysolutions.com/suretynews/how-to-get-a-car-dealers-license-in-nc The fees for the license are pretty negligeable if you’re doing business. Looks like you could be all in for under $500/year, including sourcing the dealer bond.

6’ isn’t tall enough to keep the elk out of the yard. The dog may or may not help with that.

I don’t want to argue with your perspective because I really haven’t spent much time East of I-29, but there are definitely differing scales of light pollution. The pin is your profile location. I grew up driving in the blue circle and now am mostly driving in the yellow. There’s a very noticeable difference when I drive into brighter areas that are similar to what I see around your location. I also see that most people recommending e-codes (or complaining about DOTs) tend to live in Europe, Eastern North America, or the urban west coast, all of which look pretty bad on the light pollution map. I suppose it could simply be a case of less voices in less populated areas, but it’s still a pretty clear divide. The few rural voices I’ve heard tend to agree with me that sealed beams and a relay harness are more than adequate, other than the handful of people who threw a leveling lift on their truck without aiming their lights back down, and have concluded that they now NEED a massive LED bar just to see down the road... but that’s a whole other argument. I mean, I wanted the ecodes to work. The high beams really are that good. Initially I aimed them with tape lines, moved them around a bit after that to try to make things better without getting flashed, but that didn’t really help. This summer I aimed them with an actual headlight aiming tool, and it finally solved the glare issue for oncoming traffic, but now the lights are aimed so low that I can’t see much. I can appreciate using other lights can help fill in the gaps, and I’m pretty sure that’s the way the ecodes were intended to be set up, to work alongside fog and driving lights compared to a more multi-tool approach with the DOTs. But I’ve got to point out the way you have your driving lights set up is illegal in most jurisdictions, because they are only supposed to come on when the high beams are on. And I don’t think fog lights alone are going to be enough to make up for the inadequacies of the low beams, and I don’t really want to be adding extra lights and switches to my fairly rare base ZJ. And yes, the xtravision sealed beams on my MJ with the relay harness are basically the best I’ve driven on so far out here. As long as they’re kept clean, that is. Enough light to see but not so much you’re destroying your own night vision. I unfortunately couldn’t find an h4 DOT housing for my zj, or I would’ve tried that instead of going back to factory. I’ll have to try out the autopal on my MJ though once I’ve got a relay harness figured out that plays nicely with the DRL.

I’m going to throw my two cents in and say that after two years of trying to make e-codes work for me on my ZJ, they’re going away. Going back to stock housings. The e-codes are no good at all for where I’m driving. The problem is the cutoff on the low beams. Unless you live somewhere with tons of light pollution you can’t see anything outside the cutoffs. I don’t even catch eye shine outside the beams which is a pretty big problem. There’s a big bright spot on the road ahead of you but it’s not far enough ahead to be useful and it just destroys any semblance of night vision. The high beams are actually quite good, they put a lot of light out a long way down the road, but that makes the low-beam issue worse. Not only do you need to dim them much earlier for oncoming traffic, get driving in snow, fog, even rain from the right direction, and now you can’t run the high beams at all because of the reflection back at your face, and now you’re stuck with low beams that don’t illuminate enough of the road to see. It’s even worse if you add in dips, hills, and corners, because now you need light going up to see the road on the hill, and there just isn’t any. I can definitely tell they reduce glare for oncoming traffic or if I’m following someone, which is nice enough I guess, but not being able to see where I’m going is a pretty high price to pay. The DOT is a less focussed light that scatters more. They’re definitely dimmer, and glare is worse for oncoming traffic (aim them properly and it’s less of an issue), but they at least put out light where you need it. I’d much prefer to dimly see where I need to than very clearly see where I don’t.

If it is a J10, would it not be the same dash as the full size Cherokee, Grand Wagonneer, etc.? If it is an MJ, the dash is identical to the XJ dash from the same era. Either way it shouldn’t be too hard to track down... unless you’re actually looking for a ‘79 MJ dash, which, well... not exactly a thing.

An external trans cooler was an option, but it may also have been added by a previous owner if they used it offroad or for heavy towing or hauling. Every AW4 came with the heat exchanger in the radiator, but it definitely gets a workout when the radiator is also struggling to cool the engine. On the other hand, that heat exchanger is great to have in cold climates. I’ve always wondered about this, more specifically, what the yardstick is. Most people talk about the “running hot” aspect pretty subjectively, mostly based on how hot the trans tunnel is. Shoehorning the 4.0 into an engine bay not designed for it pushes the bellhousing back a lot further under the firewall compared to a lot of vehicles, meaning the torque converter, where most of the heat is made, is in the trans tunnel. The mj/xj also has the trans sitting pretty high up in the tunnel compared to other vehicles, and the floors are notoriously thin which will both also contribute to in-cab heat. Then there’s the usage case. Driving slowly offroad with the torque converter continuously at or near stall builds a ton of heat with minimal airflow, compared to cruising around at higher speeds in less demanding terrain where you won’t build so much heat and you shed it better. And again, the xj/mj platform wasn’t really designed for seriously heavy work on the standard cooling system, and came out in a time when there weren’t that many people running automatics offroad. I’d be interested if the Toyota variants have the same reputation for heat but I’m not really in the right circles to have picked up on that. And also we’re getting pretty far into the weeds on floor coverings...

I really don’t know what it is about trailers. I haven’t got too far into the RV aspect of them, just dealing with the lights, brakes, etc. But I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s some unpublished rule that the wiring needs to be as janky as possible. If you’re lucky you’ll get exposed crimp connections, but usually it’s just scotch locks and marettes. Even on boat trailers. Like seriously, people dunk these things into the ocean, and you’re not even trying to weatherproof the wiring? I can’t imagine the rest of construction is any better... and yet somehow the thing still costs as much as a house.

It’s a bigger issue with an auto. Especially at low speeds when the torque converter is unlocked. Manuals don’t generate anywhere near as much heat, but there’s still some. When your interior is at -25, if the tunnel is sitting around freezing, it feels pretty darn warm. My ax15 ZJ gets warm in the trans tunnel area when towing, too. The constant pressure on the gear teeth does heat them up some. Heavy trucks will even have coolers on manuals to deal with the heat.