Salvagedcircuit

What better way to prove you're a useful engine than a junk run?

The Monroe 37083 OE spectrum shocks showed up. I'll let you judge on how they perform. Details: -Each shock was primed ~8 times. -Each shock has been sitting upright since yesterday when I received them in the mail. -Each shock was sealed in box. Shock#1 rise time: 3min 45sec Shock#2 rise time: 28sec They are both going back. To anyone purchasing shocks for their vehicle, or any component for the matter, make sure you test it. I am going to perform the same test on the Bilstein shocks when they arrive.

I used st.louis spring and I received something close to a metric ton leaf spring. Here's my receipt. I spent $631.20 for material and an additional $113 through UPS to ship it. I spoke to Nick who works there. He said there was never a 1700lbs rated leaf spring for the comanche. The most was 1500lbs. I told him the spring reference number, 97-571. He told me they could make a 1500lb spring. I said that's fine, but I'd like the military wrap. He said no problem. I attached a photo of what I received. My receipt says "97-535" on the item, which would indicate that he gave me a 4 leaf no helper cherokee leaf spring instead of a comanche leaf spring. I believe that was a clerical error on his part. The photo of the actual leaf spring I received shows a 4+2 combination. It's completely different than what general spring has stated for 97-555 which has a 3+1 helper and 97-571 which has a 3+2 helper. Regardless, what I received was quite substantial and I just opted to use it. If anyone wants dimensions on the thickness of the material I can do that, I'll likely be working on my truck next weekend. Other details about the leaf springs: -springs can come painted with a water based paint or no paint. My comanche has been in the rain for a month and the leaf springs have not rusted yet. -Bushing hole sizes are factory size. original holes are metric 9.8 -9/16" x 5" long grade 8 bolts are stock. I asked for 9in long. 9in is far too long. 6-7in length would be more than enough. I had to cut mine down and use a thread chaser because they were too long. Plenty of thread to torque everything down though. -leaf spring center pin material: grade 2 -U bolts come with extended length nuts -They claim they make each spring. They claim they are not drop shipped. 1-2 day turn around then ship. Shipping: -St.Louis spring quotes Fedex consumer pricing. If you have a shipping account with any shipper (Fedex, UPS etc...) you will get a better rate by generating a label and sending it to them. St. Louis Spring is located 1 mile from a UPS distribution center and 1 mile from a fedex distribution center. If you go this route, you MUST call the shipper and have someone pick up from St.Louis Spring. St.Louis spring says they don't always have a UPS guy that shows up every day. Call UPS and have a driver pickup. It will save you the headache. UPS charges $8 for a pickup charge. I used pirateship to generate my UPS labels. Do not expect fancy packaging. St.Louis spring individually wraps the springs loosely in saran wrap and then has one box for the U-bolts. You will need to generate 3 labels. After the install, the rear of my comanche was about 0.5in higher than before, but that was only because I ended up using the new moog K150405 leaf spring shackle, which claims to be 100% compatible with the comanche, but in reality is 1+7/8in shorter than the comanche shackle length. I did not feel like rebuilding my old shackles and wanted to complete the project, so I just used the new moog shackles. I have a photo of the length difference on my other camera.

Absolutely! It seems incredibly unlikely that all the shocks were bad. If shocks were statistically that unreliable, there would be a lot of companies bankrupt right now. It doesn't make sense. I'm going to see how these new oe-spectrum shocks are hopefully they will work out fine. Otherwise I'll look into KYB or bilstein. Thanks for the input!

Just using it for normal truck activities! That's it. It's not a race truck. It's not an offroad machine. It's just a work truck. From my experience in replacing front shocks on my '97 astro, which is a passenger van, and my brother's '88 XJ, and the rear shocks in my folks wk2, the shocks I received were far too weak to be working correctly. I have a set of monroe OESpectrum 37083 Shock Absorbers on order and if those are junk I'll just spend the extra money and order a pair of Bilstein 24-017985, which were designed for the 91+ cherokee with the up country 1in lift package.

Hubba hubba hubba. That's a find!

Thanks for the input. I unfortunately did not film the shocks or use any measurable means to reproduce how poor the new shocks were performing, but for example, these are shocks from a GMC Syclone. The Syclone is a similar era truck to the comanche but optimized for speed and power. If you look at his comparison, the 30 year old bilstein shocks did not take too much effort to compress where as the new ones did. it is evident that he could not fully compress the new shocks with all his weight. The brand new rancho and monroe gas-matics I purchased for the comanche performed worse than that 30 year old bilstein. I did not have to expend much effort at all to compress them. And that was after I primed them a few times. This is why I believe the new shocks I purchased were defective. I'm hoping I will find better shocks from another vendor.

Do you have a link to that cloned wilwood part? Also, make sure to check your prop valve, I went through 3 wilwood prop valves until I was satisfied with using it on my comanche. The first one had a sizeable burr on one of the threaded ports. The second was a bit better, but the 3rd looked the best. No one pays for quality control engineers anymore.

I've been having trouble finding recently manufactured front shocks for my comanche that actually work. I am after stock ride height. I just finished installing replacement springs, the MOOG CC782 Coil Spring Set and the Moog K160039 Coil Spring Insulator, to replace my 34 year old stock front springs and insulators. Yes, they are likely stock, the front shocks I removed stated marco (the monroe OEM sub brand). Made in Canada. Oh Canada! I purchased two brand new Monroe Gas-Matic LT Shock Absorbers part# 59322 from advanceauto parts online and both were dead right out of the box. It is usually best practice to prime a shock before installation and even though I primed them 3 times, I could easily slip the plastic restriction cable back onto the top of the shock before it started rising up. I could easily press the shock down with one hand. I let the shocks sit upright for about a week before installation. They were most definitely shot. I went to my local advance and picked up one Rancho RS55128. While slightly better, the shock had very little strength. After priming 3 times the shock would raise but incredibly slow. I vividly remember about 10 years ago, when doing the front shocks on my '97 astro van, that I primed the shocks before install. They were the bog standard monroe magnums but when primed I had to push down on them a lot before forcing them into the front strut tower and I just barely made it in time. The gas-matic and rancho shocks I picked up feel defective in comparison. I guess I have been having a bad month for shocks. I ordered two monroe 58484 coil-over rear shocks for the comanche and one leaked right out of the box! I rotated one of the eyelets to line them up and a pissing sound occurred and fluid leaked out of the shock. I did not even press on the shock at that point. Who could have guessed that selling an automotive parts manufacturer (Tenneco) to a brand management firm (apollo global brands) would be a good idea? What is quality control? I had to get a replacement set from rock auto. I also received 2 defective sets of monroe oe spectrum shocks for mt wk2 grand cherokee earlier in 2022. I went with bilstein and the overall quality was a lot better. I am now looking at a set of Bilstein 24-185622 shocks. The issue is they are rated for a 2-3in ride height. I am after stock height. The extended length on the Bilstein's is 22.09in. In comparison, the Rancho RS55128 has an extended length of 21.03in. About an inch difference. I'm about to sift through the bilstein catalog for a perfect match, but do you think the Bilstein 24-185622 would be good enough? Would they get damaged in this application? I did a side by side spring comparison. There was about a 0.5in height difference between the moog and the OEM spring. The moog springs also claim to have a variable rate design, with tighter coil towards the top of the spring. I don't care if my front end is slightly higher than factory stock measurements, I need something that actually works at this point. I'm going to give bilstein a call tomorrow and see what they have to say. Thanks guys

It could be as well. I had both a bad idler and a large exhaust leak and the two issues sound incredibly similar.

I just purchased metric ton springs from St.Louis spring about 2 weeks ago. I will upload some more information on them shortly. They worked very well, the build quality was quite good and they did not look like they were repackaged import rubbish. I requested a military wrap, and they did it no problem. It looks great. They claimed they made them in house in the USA. I can't confirm this as the leaf springs arrived just wrapped in cyran-wrap, no box. There was no made in mexico or china stickers or stamping on it. I would very much like to believe that they make them in house, but I can't confirm 100%. One thing to note: They have absolutely no idea how to ship items. Their website says they ship worldwide. They charge full retail for shipping. They charged me $241 to ship via fedex. I canceled and paid for UPS labels myself. They were totally fine with it. UPS charged me $110 for the same thing. Crazy. I will be writing up shortly about it with the receipts photos and everything.

Excellent. I'm going to give a 1/4-28 zerk fitting a go and see how it works. Thanks.

I'm no master mechanic, but my comanche sounded like that when my top idler went toast. I inspected it on removal and the bearings felt like they were gritty. I replaced it and the sound vanished.

I have a similar problem with my ball joints, but mine are still intact and work great - just the passenger side top ball bearing is missing a grease fitting. I looked at the top of the ball joint and while there's a hole for a fitting, there were no signs of threads in fitting itself. There are slight signs of marks, not nothing substantial. There was no sheared or cut off fitting. The ball joint has not failed at all, I just like to grease ball joints and not rely on finger crossing. I'm debating replacing the entire ball joint, but it would be a lot easier if I knew what size fitting the ball joints use. Rock auto says the Moog K100056 is the correct ball joint. I called Moog and they said the fitting is likely a 1/4-28 zerk self tapping grease fitting Does anyone else remember if the fitting they used on their ball joints was a zerk self tapping fitting? I'm hoping the previous owner just forgot to install it. Thanks!

I heard the house special tonight was a special Béarnaise sauce to go with that linguine Good luck my dude

It'll be back up. Very few people drive a manual on LI. You would have to be insane to drive a manual on the LI expressway.

It could be a LWB bar in an SWB bed. Unfortunately, it does not look like an OEM roll bar. There are seams by the top parts of the roll bar, indicating it is a mullti-part assembly. The OEM roll / sport bars are one piece. It sure is hard to tell from the photo though

Neat! Curious, what were your reasons to go to the 97+ windshield wiper motor? I have not researched it yet. Is it a better motor design? Faster wiper speed? Thanks.

Archive.org is your friend https://web.archive.org/web/20100922090257/http://www.madxj.com/MADXJ/technical/technicalfiles/ARbrakeBoosterUpgrade/BrakeBoosterUpgrade.htm In general, plug in old broken website into archive.org and there's a good chance they have a backup. 1990s-2000s designed blogs were mostly html and they archived really well. Flash based websites, not so much. But there were no walled gardens. No logins. No social network gatekeepers. no app. Just html.

Congrats! It's looking real good

I'll take it. I have 274k miles on mine. You have a message.

Calling @boxyjeep Someone needs to clone a sticker

Hmm. Those digits are doing a stadium wave or something. For reference, my odometer, with a straight purple line above it. Someone did some things.

Nice! I have a stockpile of old XT / AT keyboards for the same reason. The clacking is unmatched

Packard Bell keyboard? You sir are computing right!