Skylynx

No pictures for now but i’m making some progress! Working with Aluminum is harder than i thought and I’m waiting on some special tools i ordered to get here before i can continue, the first draft will be quite rough and just a proof of concept, the next time i do this i’ll get then pieces professionally laser cut

Gosh, the most imperfect timing ever! that’s okay, i’m glad you guys are back up in the states already, safe travels and absolutely! Lmk whenever you’re around and we’ll set up a meet!

Actually, thinking about it maybe the easiest thing to do is to just take a quick video of the thing just slowly going around it and focusing on some details by getting the camera up close to it and then just uploading that to youtube, That way we’d have way better image quality and from there i can rewind and pause to just look and reference anything that i’d need to at whichever point, that way i’m not pestering your existence with this or that particular picture!

Oh Yee of little faith, I await the day in which the world shall stop doubting my Hyperfixation! Honestly, they look a little intimidating for sure, but i don’t see anything on them that i won’t be able to easily replicate, your pictures actually made me realize that these things are actually way simpler than what i had thought they were before! I’ve already ordered some new tools to work with aluminum sheets so i can start cranking at this thing, so glad i didn’t place the order for a spot welder since apparently it’s all just rivets, yeah? IF IT’S AT ALL POSSIBLE AND NOT TOO BOTHERSOME some more extra, more up close and detailed pictures of the areas i marked would be beyond incredible and you’d be my hero forever and ever <3 Again, THANK YOU so much for all the help and the info, this has been so productive and helpful already ahaha i was hoping for maybe one or two extra esoteric pictures from far away taken with a $#!&amp;ty smartphone 15 years ago or something, and here i am getting detailed looks!

Oh okay! So even the parts that i circled in blue that i thought were spot-welds are actually rivets? If they are then that honestly makes this build way easier then! yeah measuring the exact thickness on things can be quite hard without the correct tools, but i don’t need exact measurements! Like, would you say the material on the louvers is as thick as a quarter? Slightly less? Slightly more?

@88mjsally you have no clue how grateful i am with you for this, this is amazing!!! Thank you you so much for the pictures, i would have never guessed that’s the way they attached to the window otherwise, i can confidently say that these images have taken me like 90% of the way to understanding how i wanna approach this project, but if you’d be willing to provide a tiny bit more detail on this i will be forever in your debt, honestly those pictures may have been enough but the image compression in this site is quite aggressive, and i think it’d be easier to ask question that to be chasing blurry pixels. my first and biggest question would be about the materials it’s made of and the gauges, i’m 99% certain this is aluminum but knowing how thick the louvers are and how thick the “supports” are would be a game changer! i’ve highlighted here in some images the other questions and doubts that i have, i know i’m pushy and bothersome and that i’m asking a heck of a lot but it would be SO COOL if i could clear up these questions too before i go and start spending money to replicate this things, i’ll repay you in beer and a big heckin’ steak one day i swear!

You’re literally a godsend!!! Thank you yes that would be great! Before you do that also take some pictures of it mounted to the glass so we can see how it attaches onto it if you can! Thank you!

Oh man, just saw this now! i'm in Monterrey and i have a SWB, 4.0, 2wd, 88 comanche that i'd love to see in a picture with yours! we'll get some beers to replace some of the ones Belize took!

Sorry forgot to quite you on the last message so it would ping you about it, i'm so filled with hope that you still have it ohmygosh, if you could provide any pictures of it at all it would be a massive help!

do you still have it? is there a way fr you to take more of them?

Yup, that’s where i got it from! I’m so sad that he never really posted more about such a unique piece, it would have been massively helpful on this…

I'm going to try my best at recreating the Original rear window louvers that were a VERY rare option in out trucks, but despite my best efforts i can only find two pictures of them online, i need as many of them as i can get to try and recreate them as faithfully as i can so PLEASE!!! if you've got any pictures of them please post them here to make this little experiment easier! These are the only two pictures of them that i've got.

REALLY interested in one of these! Sent you a PM, hope i’m not too late to get one!

Just bought the bosch pump and it’ll get here in a few days, i’ll report back with how much i like it or not, thanks guys!!

Heyo! I’m looking to do this upgrade in my MJ as well but i was wondering if you could elaborate on what kind of mods i’ll have to do to the carrier to accept the DW200 pump? I have an otherwise stock setup for a renix 4.0 aside from the 4 hole bosch injectors that cruiser recommended in his page. Thanks for the time <3

I guess it would be kind of preaching to the choir to say that these trucks are pretty dang dope in this site, but they honestly are! not only are they simple to work on and reliable, but they look outrageously cool when done right, the plan i have for this truck if for me to keep it forever, and i am doing my damn best for it to be the best version of itself for it to serve me as such, at least that’s kinda what i was telling myself when i swiped my card on one of These… Getting rid of the drum breaks on the back of this truck was something i knew i wanted to do since the day that i bought it, specially after i felt how terrible they were when i first drove it and how much better discs were alleged to be in may posts in this very forum, thankfully i had many options to go for in this conversion, the simplest would have been to grab a rear Chrysler 8.25 axle and put some Liberty disc breaks on that, but my previous spending habits kind of made that not an option with the cherokee dana 44 that i bought some years ago. The next option would be to to go for the ZJ disc breaks conversion and just have to accept the fact that i would have to do away with having a working parking break, which is something i was absolutely NOT OKAY with in any way shape or form at all, plus the need to rely on old, used and modified parts from a junked vehicle for my break system. ((Please pay no mind to my junkyard found jeep wj from the 2000’s break booster, that does come and bite me in the @$$ further in the story.)) this left me with just one realistic option that had everything that i wanted in one package, and sadly for my credit score it meant spending way more money than what i could at the time in a disc breaks conversion kit for my old rust bucket, i had no idea credit cards could feel pain until this point! More to show and tell in the next post!

It’s good to see more Mexican comanches around! We should start our own club!

Oh wow i actually watch your videos all the time! Your setup is pretty close to what i want to get to with mine! As ingenious as the solution in the video is i think i would rather try and replace things with the AN fittings, it’s the little steel crown with the tube that you reused that’s leaking for me, i’m hoping it’s just the o-rings and not the piece itself, though as i said i’m going to replace everything with new connectors and hose anyway

Already ordered the fuel injection hose clamps and the hose itself too! Thanks for the tip, i’m definitely ditching these ones it’s got right now

I think that’s what i’ll end up doing, i’ll get under the truck and tear everything out and see if i can reuse the tubes at all, if i do i saw these in amazon that i think could work, apparently these slide over the tubes and you tighten the half nut over them to compress it into a new a new AN thread fitting after which you can add a hose, i’m guessing these are the compression ones you meant?

Okay, so i should get the 3/8 fuel rail fitting to -6an connectors for the part of the fuel line that’s leaking? is there somewhere you’d recommend me to get those? I don’t want to cheap out on cheap chinesium here since it’s the fuel lines, i don’t mind keeping the hard line parts, just replace the rubber parts with the adequate parts, i’m already ordering the 3/8th fuel injector hose to replace the ones coming from the tank and going to the filter!

So recently i finally managed to turn on my comanche after a few years of it sitting on my garage and i’m pretty happy about that! Though i was quickly informed by my nose that having it running was likely not the best idea due to the strong smell of gasoline coming from the puddle of it forming under the engine I tracked the leak up after turning the truck off and fetching the garden hose just ion case and found that it was coming from this joint thingy on the fuel line, it sits almost under the break booster and it’s where the hard line turns into a rubber hose It was dry when i took the picture but it was dripping enough gas to make the truck shut off due to the low pressure after a few seconds, it was spraying all over the place. recently i switched my transmission coolant lines to -6AN lines and i was wondering if there was a writeup here to do that same thing but with the fuel lines for these trucks? I can’t find the part number for this rubber hose section of the fuel line to replace it, and honestly the rest of the fuel system is in such bad shape that i’d like to give it new life with better components if possible, here’s some more pictures of the state it’s in. hopefully you comanche gurus can help me find a good solution for this, thanks for the time and help!!

Heck, wanted to order one for my truck but living in Mexico comes to bite me in the rear once more, sad to see you’ve had bad luck with scammers before :<

i was going to make the next post about the doors since that is what would make sense now that i have a way to connect them to the truck, but that would be smart and boring and i just don't really do much of either as clearly shown by the fact that i own a 36 year old jeep i'm desperately trying to bring back from the dead. No, instead we're Hoppin' over the wall to do another job! The FIREWALL i mean, don't worry gringos, your jobs are safe from me. Back when i got this truck and began tearing all the crumbling junk out of it i realized that all the legends of a 4.0's reliability were not an exaggeration at all, my jaw actually dropped and i called upon my god when i began flushing the cooling system, the supposedly green antifreeze was instead just mud, brown, stinky and toxic mud that oozed out of the lower radiator hose and fitting, this already gave me an idea of how bad things were going to be but i seriously considered trashing the engine once i got to removing the thermostat housing. You're lookin' at it, that horrid and cursed moment when i managed to peel it off the engine, frozen in time in this picture to haunt further generations forever.... it's gross, i know... Want a closer look? here ya go. I've seen my fair share of dirty holes in my time but this one is quite up there with the worst of them for sure. Sadly this is also the case for the rest of the engine's water reservoirs or however you call them, it's clear that the previous owners did not care about any sort of antifreeze mixture and instead just filled the damn thing up with hose water for years. This is it after i cleaned it off as best i could to add an actual thermostat to the thing, you can see the insides of it being pretty damn rusty and crudded up, i'm not even going to try and save the old radiator which is heavy with silt and mud, and i replaced the heater core as well since the one it had before was so clogged you didn't get any airflow if you blew in one of the hoses, that's how bad things are in there. this being the original engine for the truck makes me want to preserve it as best as i can, and to give it the best chance of lasting as long as possible, i bought new everything that had to do with the cooling system for it, but i knew that would only be a temporary solution if i don't go the extra mile here and try my best as curing this rust cancer so after i washed the inside of the engine as best as i could i took a page out of @NickInTimeFilms 's video and decided to filter out all the remaining gunk this engine was going to produce with a Coolant filter like the one he got in his XJ. Here's the video in question. It's literally the same parts too! Here's your filter. And here's the base for it. I did things a little differently though, instead of mounting it all the way up on the firewall like he did i had a more "in-line" kind of idea, it took me a while to figure out exactly how i wanted to do this but i think i managed to find a pretty good solution! How bout' a Bracket right there that will hold it kinda like this? ignore the sockets the hose barb fittings are in right now, they're just there to be there really, I'd likely loose them (again) if i took them out and put them somewhere else, but here in this picture you can see where i'd mount the thing, i've got just enough space to do it, i can still access all the sparkplugs and it isn't contacting with anything, plus this way the filter is upright, which helps clear our bubbles of air from the system and it would also be in line from the water pump's tube and the heatercore! I sadly don't have any pictures of the fabrication process of it since it was such a small and quick thing to do, but here's what i came up with with the few bits of scrap steel i had laying around in a bucket, i welded the nuts on the back of it because i'd rather struggle with that right now than to have to deal with them AND the bolts in the future, and gave it a good coat of paint to go, as you can see the mounting plate is on an angle to more easily catch the hose coming out of the pump. Not too shabby!~ And here you can see some pictures of it mounted onto the engine, Spoiler alert, this next few pictures i took just now so there's a few goodies there that i've not yet gotten around to show you guys, you'll just have to wait and see when i come to those :) I'm pretty sure the way i had to hook things up to the heatercore will reverse the flow of coolant through it, but that shouldn't damage it none, the front part where the thermostat hose goes up IS a little busy.. but none of the hoses are cramped or squeezed so i'm pretty confident this is going to work!

Back when i bought this truck i thought things were going to be so simple, i really did actually believe i would be done with it in two weeks, a month tops! And that it would be so easy to do.. such a naïve child i was…. at first i wanted to return everything to stock and restore it fully since from the outside everything on the truck looks fine and well, but once you took as deep of a dive into a project like this i found out that the truck was just a tad too far gone for this to ever be possible with any reasonable time-frame and bank account depth, thing is, by the time i realized this i already owned the damn thing and it was disassembled into hundreds of individual, maintenance deprived pieces. now it was MY problem to see what i could do with it… Resto-Mod, what a word, huh? I’d restore what i can and modify what i couldn’t, or even improve on the original design with new things wherever possible, God knows i’m not smart enough to be an engineer to be able to add functional curtain airbags to this damn thing, but i can add some fun stuff sill!~ I’ve seen quite a few XJ and Comanche builds with removable or replaceable doors before and i kind of want that for my rig, i like being able to feel the breeze as i drive by, nothing like breathing in the coal smoke of a semi speeding next to you cause your piece of junk is too slow even for them (That and i’m also to greedy and cheap to turn on the AC) that being said, i'm super lazy as well, and whenever i'm driving with the actual doors on i'd like to be able to raise and lower the windows electronically, which so far into the story, the truck doesn't have yet but will eventually! of course that presents us with a problem, and that would be once again the wiring that would be needed to make such a thing happen, those damn wires are going to end up driving me nuts i swear.. Of course, power locks and windows need electricity to work, and signal wires to tell them to go up and down or whatever whenever they're switched, this implies wires that connect the truck to the doors and keeps them together, it's not only the hinges that need modification in this case then, but the harness as well Problem... ... meet solution!... kinda, these bulkhead connectors that i found HERE (amazon) were absolutely not a direct fit into the Comanche and absolutely needed a good bunch of modification to work, but with them i found a good and simple way to plug and unplug the wiring of my doors to the cab and make my (eventual) dream of having fully working electric doors that can also be easily removed a reality! I did a WHOLE lot of research about this mod online before i even bought these and i did come across another solution that some people were writing about in forums which you may have heard about as well, apparently there's some great quality bulkhead connectors that came in some ZJ's that you could use, but it needed to be one that was specc'd with some kind of upgraded "infinity" audio package from the dealership to have them Those were of course my first option for this project but listen, i much have gone to 10 junkyards, maybe scavanged the carcasses of 50 or more ZJ's in search for these dumb things, and not a single one of them had them, even the ones with the high end trims lacked those connectors, so i just gave up and went the Delphi option on amazon, and honestly thank god i did, these things are QUALITY. I mean just look at the damn thing! FAIR WARNING THOUGH! If you decide to buy these and do the same thing i did make yourself a favor and get your butt to Walmart, buy about 3 or 4 big glass jars and exchange as much money as you can into quarters, because you'll be really needing those swear jars with this one, it's not an easy process at all, or at least it wasn't for me. There's a lot of measuring, marking, meticulous cutting, bending and hammering that needs to happen for things to go right, you'll have to do a decent bit of "Jeep Yoga" as i call it as you try to get an eye of what else needs to be done in such a cramped space. I decided that the interior part of the connector would be the male one with the orange gasket on it,since that one also had the two anchoring points on it and made the most sense, since the "mobile" one needed to be on the door side, and the "secure" one needed to be in the truck part of what made this little project such a big headache was that everything seemed to be almost perfectly right, but on the opposite side to be perfectly convenient, for example the only part of the connector that has the weatherproof gasket on it was the male side that went into the interior, which is great as to keep water from sneaking into the cab, but wouldn't do much at preventing from getting into the space in between the inside door and the exterior one Next time you're at a junkyard make sure to grab a couple of those rubber boots that protect the wiring from the door to the cab as i had done before, because that's what i used to solve this issue, they have a thick rubber rink that holds them in place and seals the hole the cables go through, and cut that out from both ends to make two perfectly sized gaskets i could use on the female side of the connector, i just needed to make two small cutouts to fit around the plastic alignment studs and that was it, it's almost as if they were made for this! now i can keep water from creepin' into the space between the inside and out more effectively Next on the modification list was the connector itself, this needed to be done because the female connectors had the screws on them, and the male connector had the nuts. You may be askin' thyself "well why in the heck does that need modifying? it's normal for the females to get screwed and the males to have the nuts, it's what god intended!" Well i'm glad you asked! yet another example of things being nearly perfectly convenient, just flipped around. if i were put the wires in these connectors as they are, connected them, tightened that bolt to secure them in place and then wrapped the wires in insulation then it would be then impossible for me to get to that bold again without unwrapping the harness again, since the bolt is in the middle of the darn thing, and if i didn't wrap the outside wires I'd risk them getting damaged because they're more exposed to the elements.... If things were reversed, however... i could tighten the bolt from inside the cab where the wires are more protected and still keep them secure! A simple push of the bolt on the female connector managed to pluck it out, but on the female side things were more involved, i decided to try and drill the nut's threads out for the bolt to be able to pass freely from the other side, but the whole thing ended up coming out once it got warm enough as you can see, here's one of the unmodified male connectors next to the nut i got from the other one. i grabbed a generic nut that fit the bolt from home depot and glued it n the female connector with JB weld where the bolt used to sit in, making sure to be careful and not get epoxi in the threads while i did it, and with that i reversed the way the bold tightens both sides of this bulkhead connector together, making it way more convenient for my particular use case! Next up on the Modification list was the Comanche itself...This is the one that hurt the most for sure, but it's the one that in the end made all this possible, as you can see in this next picture the hole in the outside it literally the perfect size for the female connector to fit inside once you've cut the indexing slits for the alignment plastic thingies on the connector, but the hole in the inside wall is much to small for the male connector to pass through, which meant some good ol' Hole enlargement was in order, thankfully I'm very skilled at making holes bigger ;) i used a drill to cut an outline of what i needed to remove and then polished the edges with a dremel, then lined up the male connector, marked where the securing studs needed to go through and made a hole on those as well, and painstakingly added nuts to those studs through the very little space i had to finally secure the male connector to it's permanent residence. Here's the enlarged hole at the end of it. And here's the male connector secured to the inner wall of the cab, just perfect!, now with that in place i went ahead and carefully cut the indexing grooves in the outer hole to line up the female connector with the male one fixed in place, and well, would you look at that. Fits like a damn glove! I did the same for the pilot's side and i can confirm that it does fit with all the mess of wires and connectors there, but just barely, that side was definitely way harder than this one, but it's done now and it works! I think the thing i hated the most about this project was that i had to make everything twice, but the result is definitely worth it in my opinion!