DracoSedentis

UPDATE: Drove the truck around today and the squeal has (mostly) gone away. Will keep tabs on it. HOWEVER, a nice new issue has cropped up. 3 times during driving the engine turned off. It only happened when I was coming to a stop, took it out of gear into neutral. The truck has a rough idle anyway, which I'm amazed the shop I had it in didn't address, the third time it happened was right outside my driveway while my wife was moving the car out of the way; I came to a total stop, shifted it into neutral and about 3 seconds later the RPMs dropped off and it died. I'm nearly at a loss what it could be so suddenly. I've thought maybe the Alternator, then perhaps the IAC. Any ideas?

Further research reveals it may not be my AC compressor. It looks like a small section of the new belt is rubbing on the plate directly behind the pulley attached to the alternator. Moving it around a bit has stopped the squealing noise on startup and idle. Will be doing further testing. Will keep posted if I go back to the compressor. And yes HOrnbrod, that is the correct belt pattern.

Yeah, just figured out the signature part. Should be fixed now. And no, that part does not fit. But thanks for trying. So far this site has been a HUGE help.

So my AC compressor pully has as of these past 2 days began a wonderful squealing noise. I was wondering, like I did with our liberty, is there a diagram of how to bypass that pully? I don't care if I have AC or not.

Nice. Speaking of Pain in the butt, earlier was glanced over how to fit the WJ lower control arms into a comanche by doing some bushing grinding. Is there anywhere I can find info on how to properly do this? "99-04 Grand Cherokee lower control arms. The metal sleeves in the bushings have to be ground down for them to fit (grind each side the same amount), not very difficult."

Well, I reckon I'll be just buying some new ones instead by the sound of things. Which tbh I'm ok with new. LOL Excuse my newness but what is this "PITA" being bandied about? Pain in the @$$?

I plan on doing that soon. I have 3 or 4 pull-a-parts near where I live, hopefully I can score the WJ lower control arms, maybe a steering wheel. There seem to be a lot of jeeps availible at these places near me. Maybe I'll luck out.

Agreed, I'd rather have another jeep wheel but I really don't mind as long as it is thicker than what is on there now.

Yup, After looking further into that I think I'm going to hold off on messing with it since there is a potentially high possibility of muffing it up by doing it myself. I'm pretty capable when it comes to mechanic work but I don't want to mess up my steering LOL On a side note, anyone know of a decent steering wheel that wouldn't be hard to swap out? I'd like to have one with a bit more surface area to grab onto. The stock Comanche one is about the width of 2 pens taped together....

I like the rims as well, trying to decide if I want to put the new tires on them and put the stock wheels on new rims or vis-a-versa. After reading the responses here I'm thinking I'm going to forgo the lift since this is just going to be a daily driver and some occasional dirt trails and back wood driving. No rock crawling for this jeep. If I need to lift it I'll do it much later. I'm a a little taller than most but not enough to warrant needing a lift much, I think the height gained by the larger tires will be perfect for what I'm using it for. And yeah its an inline 4 so I'm trying to get the off road utility and look as close as I can without making it sluggish. My wrangler is an inline 4 on 35s (bought that way) and it is SLOW lol

Good things to know. The swap job on the control arms doesn't sound that bad. I've done harder jobs on my wrangler lol. Sounds like 30s will be the way to go with some WJ control arms. Thanks for clearing that up for me guys. I'll do some research on steering work and see what I can find out on that. If you guys have any other suggestions that you think would help me or make better anything I'd be happy to receive them!

Thanks for this, fantastic, I'll look further into these options and see what I can do for the security. I've done some digging this morning as well on the no lift everyone keeps thumbing up. I'm starting to lean towards that. I managed to find an old thread here that talks in good detail about that in particular. I have more questions on it though as I've found some other potentially helpful info I need clarified. They've said both 30s and 31s will work without to much issue outside of lower control arm rubbing. A solution I've seen for running both sizes in the same thread is swapping the lower control arms on my MJ to WJ lower control arms since they have a boxed in style along with a "S shape bend" in them that give some movement room on turns without rubbing. My question with that is, what year WJs lower control arms will fit with my MJ if I go that route, and are they a direct swap or a bloody knuckles and cussing swap? I've also read that it works with only "jeep rims" they don't specify what jeep rims though. I've got the stock spoke style rims on this jeep , OLD ones, like what is in this picture: I'm wondering if these below are what they mean by 'jeep rims':

Thanks for all the tips guys. Seems to be a popular opinion of just running stock height with some 30's. I'll certainly look into that. If you guys have any reference pictures that would show what that might look like I'd be grateful. As for the steering and looking for slop, I'll check the joints and track bar system first before I go messing with the steering box. Out of curiosity would it be worth upgrading the steering track bar to something beefier? I remember a couple years ago reading up on swapping an XJ or some other models tie rods and trackbar to my wrangler for a tougher kit. Would that be recommended here? I will not get rid of the Marchal lights either. I will keep them and perhaps work on re-conditioning them to be functional again. I'd also be interested in any information you guys might have on 4 point harness bucket seats, steering wheel swaps, and the rare roof mounted visors I've seen on some Comanches.

It is very clean. Well, age wise. It needs a bath right now LOL. The only major rust spots I could find was a patch under the driver side wheel well, bottom of tub, abut 7 inches long but not to bad. And then the back bumper is rusted bad. Its getting replaced though so no big deal. I bought it for 3400, dumped 2600 into having all the major repairs they could find done. New starter, new gaskets all over, new engine and transmission mounts, new clutch etc etc. LOTS. fiatslug, the lights up front are both original one is just missing the little emblem on it, aged off I guess. They don't actually turn on right now. I'll be replacing them with something newer after I do the other projects first.

Hello everyone, First time MJ owner here. Long time TJ owner. I just picked up an '86 MJ XLS and have lots of questions but I'll keep it to the most important ones right now. First up, steering. The truck drives great but I'm wanting to tighten up the response time on the steering. It seems to have lots of play in it compared to every other vehicle I've owned. Is there anything I can do to tighten this up outside of replacing the steering box altogether? Or should I just do that? Second, Security. I live in Utah. LOTS of people compared to the little town in Indiana I recently moved from. I have followed several FB pages for jeep groups out here and have noticed a recent uptick in stolen jeeps. I'm from a quiet town that I could leave my jeep out all night with the keys in it and know it'd be there in the morning. Not so sure of that out here. I've been researching security measures for vehicles in general and would like to install a dizzy switch. I bought this jeep from private seller and so am lacking a proper owners manual. However, I found a couple diagrams and some info on the fuse system and have learned there doesn't seem to be a fuel pump fuse in the setup under the dashboard like my wrangler does. I wanted to use that for the switch, is there another way to do that or are there other options that might work better? Final question, for now, Lift kit and tire/wheel sizes. I've been shopping around for a simple lift kit for this. To clarify, this is not going to be an major off-road crawler. I have the wrangler for that already. This is my daily driver. However, that being said, I still want to lift it a little and put some more aggressive wheels on it both for the look and utility. My question here is this. I don't want to go over 3" of lift and what I'm trying to figure out is what size of lift and wheels would be good to give me the nice look/utility as well as not look like its shoes are to small for its feet. So to speak. It doesn't need to be overly fancy as again, daily driver and perhaps dirt roads here and there. I've been looking at a simple rough country 3" lift with some 15" black steel wheels and 31" tires. Jeep Model: 1986 Jeep Comanche XLS MJ , 2.5L 5speed manual, Longbed.