gogmorgo

Autocorrect strikes again. I meant to ask how you found the floorpan. "to begin with?"

I haven't really figured out whether the problem with the aftermarket stuff is related to the differences between MJ and XJ floors, or if the aftermarket just sucks. Stamped sheet metal parts aren't ideal for reproduction by 3D printing. Sintered metal doesn't have the inherent strength necessary for such a task, it's a lot like comparing a sheet of plywood to a sheet of partical board. I'm sure there's some kind of cnc machine out there capable of taking a raw sheet and hammering out one-offs in a fashion akin to hand-beating, but it would be in a highly specialized shop, time consuming, and probably incredibly expensive. It could be CNC milled from billet, but that's also ridiculous for the size of block you'd have to start with only to retain about 5% of it in the finished piece. The best way of reproducing sheet metal panels is unfortunately the same way the factory did, stamping it out in a gigantic press with a custom die. The expense there is the machine to do it, and then making the expensive dies, but having done that, it's really no different to stamp out 100 panels than it is to make just the one. A 3D scan would go a long way towards the production of a die, but the trick would be finding someone with the necessary press and convincing them it's worth their while to go to the trouble and expense of making dies when they're not likely to sell out a batch of 100 floorpans in the next 20 years.

Even if there's no call for the full floor, it could still be useful for repops of the sections that commonly rot out, if some company was interested in selling pieces that actually fit. But you're undoubtedly right. Making a custom metal pressing die even the size of just a footwell is likely going to be prohibitively expensive. How do you track down a thing like that to being with?

It was -20°F on my drive to work this morning. My drive home this afternoon was at +30. Don't get your hopes up though cause it's just mountain weather being dumb. Still some -25 lows in the forecast for the weekend, with highs below 10°F.

Jack up front axle and grab the wheel and give it a good shake. If there's movement when pulling/pushing on the top and bottom, it indicates ball joint problems. Left/right will be tie rod(s). Play in all directions will be wheel bearing. A bad tie rod end will affect both wheels, but ball joints or wheel bearings are unlikely to cause problems on both sides. Steering tires also will wear on the inside more by nature of being steering tires. Our fleet at work has a spotty history of tire rotations, and a lot of the older tires tend to wear like that if they've never been rotated, even with nothing wrong with the truck.

You can probably grab the fuel rail for a '91-95 XJ, maybe a YJ, or ZJ, with 4.0 at a yard and run a return line back as well.

The days are getting noticeably longer again. There's a good hour and some of daylight now after I'm home from work. It's only the odd patch, but there's bare pavement poking through the streets around town. The few months until it quits snowing will fly by.

"30 year old impractical concept truck". Still has a longer bed than the new "practical" thing.

There's a lot of cheap junk out there with "DOT-approved" on it, which doesn't actually meet any sort of standard. The proper US DOT indication is "DOT-compliant" (not "approved") and will always fall back on a FMVSS108, SAE, or ECE standard. That's not to say the retailer is going to display that info, but it will be available from the manufacturer, and some retailers genuinely use "dot-approved" by mistake instead of "compliant". I myself do take issue with LED headlights. Many vehicles use the highbeams at reduced voltage as DRLs, but a lot of aftermarket lights don't address that, meaning if the driver hasn't switched on headlights they'll be running highbeams and blinding traffic around dawn and dusk when the it's darker but you don't really need headlights. It's also not uncommon to install levelling kits on trucks, but no one seems to consider the need to aim the headlights back down again after that. I also find the light spectrum LEDs put out incredibly harsh even when aimed properly, destroying my night vision. I've also seen problems with some of them projecting, pretty much they'll create a big bright spot of light in front of you, but the contrast of bright light makes it tough to see things that don't fall directly in the bright spot. The solution to that is making big bright spots everywhere, but then you'll run into not being dot-compliant and blinding other drivers, so then they get sharper cutoffs which just exacerbates not being able to see outside the beams. I also suspect some LED lights will switch to low by using pulse-width modulation which I find incredibly straining on my eyes. Plus the white is nasty reflecting off snow. The "dim" factory lights on the other hand produce a more yellow wash that's easier on the eyes, less destructive to night vision, and fades out rather than having sharp cutoffs, meaning there's more illumination outside the direct beam, and you can see better. I would hope the higher-end LEDs are better, but you never know. I also have experienced people struggling to see out of vehicles and ask about getting brighter headlights, and point out that their big beautiful stereo with pretty shiny lights is blinding them, or their bright led dash lights, backlit LED screens etc.

If you haven't already, you can check out this forum section: https://comancheclub.com/forum/9-adventure-planning-regional-groups/

Thanks, but I'm going to pass. I've been thinking about trying to make my parts XJ's rear belt work, the later versions are retractable as well, but I'm still hoping for "authentic".

Make sure you get the centre cap with the wheels you get. They look a whole ton better with them, and I don't know that you can get them any other way.

I'm pretty sure you can buy most of the tool truck tools online now. I've mostly been buying Napa UltraPro... I hella can't afford tool truck tools, and I enjoy the fact my small town has a parts store and I like to support it.

My ZJ has a factory 231. I'm pretty sure it was the base model tcase behind the automatic as well, at least while they were still building base models, but there definitely aren't many out there. But either way it doesn't mean it hasn't been swapped out at some point. But I wouldn't use a 42re either. Everything you could possibly want to know about interchanging AW4s: https://www.naxja.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1053970

Well the master cylinder could be on its way out then. You could try bleeding it specifically before swapping out. Either bench bleed it with outlet lines directed back into the open reservoirs, or just do it by cracking the lines on it, same principle as bleeding at the bleed screws, get a helper to pump the brakes as you crack and tighten the lines. Wear eye protection and use a rag to catch as much of the fluid as possible, and then hose down the engine bay really well with water if you like having paint on things in there.

Everything's cost prohibitive shipping to Canada, but sometimes you just have to deal with it. It didn't occur to me they might ship, though, so I might have to contact them. http://www.jwjeep.com Seems like a decent operation, but I don't know that I'd call ten acres huge. The one I used to go to back home is about 100... But maybe that's just a Canadian prairies thing. I guess they say ten acres of just Jeeps so that's a bit I guess.

Nothing particularly special or valuable about it though, other than it being a '92. https://imageappoh.car-part.com/image?seller=2276&partGUID=2276-1-314838&vehicleGUID=2276-1-V6401&display=1992 Jeep Comanche Front Seat Belt Assembly-Stock%23 8J5301#1 Found in a search for seat belts at car-part.com, at a yard in Antelope, CA. It's a '92 2.5L, 2wd by the looks of it. Definitely seen better days, but the body looks clean enough. 3223 Mill St is still a Jeep dealer in Reno. I wonder how long they used it as their shop truck? And interestingly enough, if you look up the dealers address in google maps, the street view image is this parked in front:

Bump, still looking.

"Covered" haha. Enjoy it while you can.

Do you still have the load sensing valve in the picture? You can just barely see it, the rod coming up off the left hand side of the diff, and the bar going down and left from the top of that. That's the way it's supposed to be set up, but sometimes they will over-centre themselves, and the bar ends up pointing downwards, which significantly reduces pressure to the rear brakes. Proper bleeding procedure is to crack open a front bleed screw and then bleed rear right then left with the front screw open, then close the front screw and bleed rear right and left again, then front right and left. The shuttle valve that triggers the brake warning light moves to provide full braking pressure around the load sensing valve if there's uneven pressure between the two, essentially a front brake failure. Opening the front bleeder simulates a front brake curcuit failure, shifting pressure to the rear, allowing you to bleed out the backup line. If that line has air in it, the shuttle valve will always move over and you won't have much for brakes. Once you have that line bled out, the system will function normally, allowing you to bleed normally.

Depending on the yard, yeah I know a couple that don't crush things until the bones are picked clean... but in most cases a couple years is pushing it. Even if most of it is still there, some yards will refuse to sell the vehicle whole on top of it, whether due to provincial or state law, or simply a liability concern, and as brought up, even if they do sell it, you'll now be hunting for the rare parts that get snapped up quickly and a bunch of other random stuff. Plus there's a strong probability they drained fluids by punching holes in pans, or reckless shoppers have wrecked parts to get at others, and you don't know what happened to it at the last guy's hands to warrant scrapping it. By all means it's worth investigating and finding out whether it's worth recovering or not, but I wouldn't get too hopeful. I can appreciate sentimental value, but it's almost guaranteed to cost you less time and money finding one that's already on the road, or at least reasonably complete.

Modern winter tires. There's even a handful of all-terrains out there with the snow-peak rating if you only want to run one tire year-round. I don't think I've triggered my ABS once since installing the Grabber ATX's. As far as abs goes, funnily enough one of the best systems I've used is the one in my ZJ. 26 years and 180,000 miles after leaving the factory it's totally functional. The advantage of that would be the availability of junkyard components. Probably still some new or aftermarket availability there as well, given it was standard on the ZJ. Just an idea. I remember someone in another Jeep club was really struggling to find parts to get his going again on his OBD1 XJ. I don't know how common ABS was on 97+ XJs. You need not only the pump, but I suspect master and booster that are compatible, the control module, and wheel speed sensors. Early systems frequently would have only three speed sensors, one for each from wheel and one on the rear diff. The sensors also need tone rings to read off. One of my MJs currently has shafts with tone rings installed, so that wouldn't be a huge deal, although I don't know where the sensors would mount... somewhere near the hub. ZJ knuckles might solve that if they're compatible, not too sure as its a low opinion axle. I don't really know how you'd do the rear though. I really don't know what's going on there, but MJs, XJs and ZJs have overlapping axle options so something could probably be figured out easily enough. You'll also probably need to run all new brake lines, and you'd lose your distribution and proportioning blocks, because ABS takes over those functions. Except I'm not at all convinced it's worth it. With just older cheap winters on my 2wd MJ, I'm not really having problems stopping, and I don't think there's a lick of bare pavement anywhere in town. But mostly, I've had perfectly functional ABS nearly kill me. I definitely would not want to try to cobble my own together. My situation involved gravel, admittedly a bit much speed, a small cliff, and a blown out rear brake line on my 2001 Jimmy. I hit the brakes, locked them up, and then they released entirely. What happened was the ABS unlocked the front wheels, and sent full pressure to the rear wheels, except having blown out the rear brake line, it just dumped fluid on the ground. Suddenly no brakes at all as I'm understeering towards a drop that would not have left the Jimmy on its wheels. Without ABS doing its thing I still had the front brakes. Not ideal, but it still worked. With ABS doing its thing, intermittently I had no brakes at all. Yeah, with proper maintenance that shouldn't be a problem, but you never know. Not dying is nice.

Well the Juke has been un-bricked and I had a chance to move the MJ out of the driveway so I could clear the snow so I could put the MJ back in the driveway and have a small tire changing party. The are the factory wheels that came on the base model ZJ. I think they look better on the MJ. Because my other MJ is parked I'd pulled the non-winter tires off of it and stuck them on the ZJ, because these wheels have winters on them, and I didn't want to burn them off in the summer... plus they looked ridiculous being only a 215/75r15 with a 2" lift. A couple weeks ago when I put 31's on the ZJ, I stuck them on the little MJ's factory wheels that had come loose along with it. So now the aftermarket wheels whatever they were are piled in the garage, the bigger MJ is back on its own wheels and tires, and the ZJ and little MJ have swapped wheels. But both my drivers have snow-peak-rated tires now which is great, because I live here: Where there are peaks. And snow. And when I say that, what I mean is the last month I think that it did not snow at least one day here was July 2017. Traction is underrated. I definitely like the look of the Jeep steelies a ton better than those silly alloys that stuck out too far. It rides better too now. I didn't mention it, but the brakes did only need bled. After a bit of use they've stopped making noises as well. I did check them while the wheels were off, and everything checks out, so I'm thinking the noise was just a bit of rust on the rotors from sitting. Today was also the first good run on the highway. I put more miles on it today than the whole time I've owned it, haha. It did pretty darn good for itself, although the heater did seem to be fading at speed. I'm thinking vacuum leak, although it still has the heater valve, so I might bypass that and see what gives. The vent selection and blend door seemed to be working fine. The heat's hot sitting idling though, and it didn't have problems warming up when it was -30 out, so I'm thinking the new thermostat is fine, it's just seeing reduced flow at reduced vacuum due to increased engine speed.

It always shocks me that things like this end up in a wrecking yard. That poor Waggy is in better shape than literally everything I own. Hopefully it's parts go to good use at least...