ghetdjc320

Just to confirm, those two end cables in that connector above are indeed the tuner L/R for the AM & FM. When viewing the white 7 pin connector as in the picture above, starting at the left side, pin 1 is Left channel pin 2 is Right channel. This is on an RX173 radio but looking at the older RX I have here, I believe this pinout logic is the same.

This one popped up recently: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EUNrSKCKr/?

Spring is nice but flash floods can be an issue. October/November can be nice as well. The cooler weather can be a bit of a benefit when climbing off-road.

@boxyjeep has a nice setup: https://boxyjeep.com/products/jeep-cherokee-xj-ax-15-tunnel-cover-1984-2001

Looking good! If you can, get a build thread going so you can document your progress along the way. Also, I would emphatically suggest you make sure there are zero water leaks in the cab before buttoning everything back up

The “Park” feature is a function of the motor itself. I’d check your grounds. You may have some continuity but you may not be able to pass enough current to keep that circuit alive and finish the sweep.

Check with @boxyjeep. He offers a lot of gauge cluster parts and I’d bet he has one.

Nice looking truck! Always liked the look of the “Chief” graphics. I’ll take a crack at some of the questions: 1. There is no insulation in the crossmember. The cross member design does have several sandwiched pieces of metal that can indeed get moisture and oxidation traps, but the crossmembers were typically galvanized (one of the very few pieces on MJ’s) and normally hold up decently. They are fairly lightweight and still solid enough for their use. 2. First off, your XJ is getting rather phenomenal MPG so the comparison might be a bit off. 16 mpg for a lifted 4x4 MJ with a 4.0 is very normal and typically within range. What is interesting though is that you noticed it wasn’t getting as warm as your XJ. If indeed the gauge is accurate, a rich running engine will get lower MPG & typically runs cooler. A renix engine monitor or REM can be a really handy tool to help you see what the ecu is doing and can sometimes help track down issues. 3. If the turn signals were working then went out as you drove with the headlights on, my bet is that it’s the sockets and/or bulbs themselves. I’d remove all the sockets, clean them, add some dielectric grease and swap in some new incandescent bulbs.

That stuff is quite different to Dynapad. The Silas stuff is similar to Dynamat which is typically a thin aluminum skin with Butyl or similar backing. The Dynapad is a heavy and thick insulation type material.

This is the stock am/fm radio line input from the main board to the preamp board. Now we know the audio path which looks to be the same across the RX series of radios. You can entirely disconnect this 7 pin connection which runs from the main board to the preamp but you will loose your tone controls and a bit of gain. There was no perceptible background noise difference either way so I left it connected to maintain tone controls but de-pinned the am/fm tuner. This head unit will be just a pure source unit with nothing but a clean aux signal. I’ll term this more of a “hifi” unit. But I have another RX-173 I’ll convert to a multi purpose unit and may even retain the tape player as I can see now how to cleanly integrated aux and eliminate any bleed through without disabling the tuner section. Most of the information o have seen referenced only indicates that the AM radio bleeds through. I can see why that is the assumption as the am radio gain is fairly high. But once you reduce that gain and unify it to the fm gain, you’ll notice that there is still tune bleed in both am and fm bands. To test this, connect your aux source, pause the music, and turn your radio volume to max. Likely you will hear the bleed through. I’ll try to identify which of these pins does what but for now, this is a simple way to defeat the tuner bleed and remove the signal from the path altogether.

Cut it into pieces as Pete mentioned. Personally, I only use dynapad on horizontal surfaces so I don’t run it up the sides of the tunnel. I use a couple of layers of dynamat for vertical areas followed by dynaliner. The dynapad is phenomenal stuff but can make it hard to install carpet if you get it on the areas where the carpet has to bend or curve such as the tunnel hump. Installing dynapad around the frame caps on the floor works excellent. Don’t be afraid to cut your the shapes you need instead of trying to use it as a continuous uncut piece. Also, give yourself some gaps around the seat belt anchors, and specially the outboard ones in the rocker panels. Those are already tough to get to with just the carpet there.

Wanted to provide a quick update. I tested the aux input today and it works perfectly with zero perceptible interference or noise. However, if I pause the music and turn up the volume all the way, I am still able to make out radio signals. I don’t think anyone would ever know but that’s just unacceptable to me. So I still have to rid this radio of that interference. Will trace those lines and see what can be done. Now that I’ve eliminated the tape deck, I may just eliminate the tuners as well. It would just leave me with an empty shell of a radio but It would be a pure source for the system. It would be easy to add Bluetooth as well and I may still retain that as an option. It is handy to have a radio still but the audio tap method does not duck it far enough for my liking. I need that signal cut, not just hiding in the background somewhere.

Looking forward to what you come up with. I ended up having to daily drive my MJ for almost a year and that totally changed the way I mod it now.

Of course, it’s a Tensily 10-06000. The shielding dumps to ground and you can panel mount it if you get a longer version. I just wanted the short pigtail though to add an aux cable to.

Dumping some pics here of what I decided to do. My entire goal was to eliminate noise and interference, providing the cleanest audio possible. I also equalized to gain for the sources across all the inputs (AM/FM/AUX). Pleased to report impeccable signal integrity and zero noise. I’ll post up some more technical info at some point but I’m deep into building out the ultimate MJ stealth audio system at the moment. Keep an eye on my “Tomahawk” thread in epic tech for updates. In a nutshell, I desoldered unused wiring on the preamp to avoid any interference being picked up. I also removed the TP pins and wired shielded cable straight to the board. Instead of using the chasis ground, I used the dedicated signal ground shared by the tuner and tape deck. I rerouted line level cables, attenuated the tuners for level matching, and added some cable management. Also straightened the transistor and capacitor caps. Cleaned the board and conditioned the connection ports, volume and tone controls. Cleaned up the front face and ceramic coated it. Also worth noting that I eliminated the tape player all together. I don’t use it and now the radio has much more internal airspace to route cabling and stay cooler. The old 13pin connector has been folded back and zip tied off for now.

Thanks! I’m also curious to see how it turns out

This is the cluster from my “Tomahawk” build. It took a very long time to source this and put together. This is the 91+ “HO” U.S. style cluster but with the matching uber rare 120mph speedo (not to be confused with the police package speedo which had the blue font). Took me a couple of years to just source the parts for this cluster. 88k miles showing on the speedo.

Before I forget, I've been meaning to cross reference this post and link it here. This is the earliest info I came across on modifying these radios. The post is from 2010 and is from a user I am unfamiliar with though I'm sure many of you you him. Here is the link:

Not personally sure other than I know he was really busy with work. Last I saw of him on CC was just briefly back early this year or end of last. We were working together on a radio project for a couple of years but it fizzled and I lost contact. Having given up on ever seeing that project again, I picked up a couple of radios in the past few months and have been working at demystifying some of the data on them especially in regards to modding them. From what I gather, the first references I found regarding modding these head units date back to some tech posts about 16 years ago from a different user and quite some time before Jeremy picked up and expounded on the subject. Here is the original post I dug up. Going to link this info in the DIY section as well so all the data stays in one easier to find place:

I used satellite. Just told them it's a 97 Cherokee. No issues.

Further testing has revealed something interesting that is my current working theory. While tracing signal flows, you can find the distinct AM, FM and Tape sources all coming to the pre-amp board. They first go through the tone control stages starting with treble, then bass, then volume, then out of the board on that 3 pin jacketed cable to the amp stage. Interestingly though, the balance and fader controls have a separate 6 pin connection that seem to run their logic at the amp stage. So basically, if you want to retain fader and balance controls without heavily modifying the PCB, you'll need to use the speaker level outs. Interestingly enough, when I adjusted the AM gain pot on the main board, I got zero am radio bleed through while using the aux in. Removing (or just disconnecting) the tape deck main plug also accomplishes the same thing. It appears that the AM/FM signal is always present at the preamp stage. But the tape deck logic has a radio mute function when playing a tape, causing the preamp to pickup that signal instead. When we inject audio on those test point pins, we seem to be simply overlaying the radio signal. Quite possible we are tricking a transistor somewhere on the pcb since grounding either of these pins also cuts the signal instantly. Instead of using those test point pins, I'd prefer to desolder them and keep mire wiring shielded as far as possible until it makes it to the board. That should help cut down on a bit of interference I've noticed. The signal to noise ratio seems to be decent but I'm limited in how I can test this. I will say though that I am getting very good audio quality by making some adjustments to the board. And I'm very picky when it comes to audio quality

Of course! Happy to help demystify these things a bit.

Out of curiosity, does this radio have an aux input mod? Take a quick picture of your preamp circuit board. It’s the one with the volume and tone controls potentiometers. If you’re amp is testing ok (which it should) check for a 3 pin jacketed cable (typically grey) that runs from the preamp board to the main circuit board to ward the rear of the radio. Make sure it is plugged in well onto the main board. This line carries the line level audio signals from the preamp stage. The aux input mod uses a pair of factory test points to inject audio into the signal pathways. A simple short to ground here will knock out the audio entirely for the am/fm tuner.

Here’s the beginning of this project. 1/2” birch for the shell which is appropriate for the JL 6.5 subs. Exact dimension tbd but I’m within a narrow range. QTC will be in the .75 range

So I’m reading .15 vac or .21vrms on the preamp audio output. To get this reading I applied a 60hz sine wave input at max volume with tone controls at neutral. This is quite low to run directly into RCA outputs. Given the internal build quality and lack of DSP in this radio, I think the best signal path for amplification will come from the speaker level outputs. I’d be inclined to run a 4 input line output converter to preserve the fader function (in my case I’d use them as a subwoofer bias for my b pillar subs project). I believe someone else noted the outputs as being around .6vrms. Not sure where that reading was taken and with what method.