DirtyComanche

I think we asked before, shipping to Canada is quite terribly expensive? I'd love to have a bumper, mine is thrashed and don't really have the time to make a new one.

I've been busy at work and beat/sick (it's that time of year) so I didn't work on this as much as I wanted to. But I did bleed the brakes out no less than 3 times. Maybe 4 or 5 times. Tonight I finally got it to be reasonable, well, probably as good as it gets, mounting the rear calipers upside down definitely didn't help me. On the test drive braking wasn't spectacular, but I'm comparing it to a very modern vehicle (2011 JK) and a vehicle with a hopped up hydroboost setup (plow truck). I could mash it and get the brakes locked up, or slowly apply more pedal until they locked up, so I really think it is working properly... Only thing is the brake fail light will NOT go off. I've smacked the distribution block to try to get it to reset, pumped the brakes a ton of times, etc. Still on. Mind you, it didn't come on until after I had done 6 or 7 bleeding runs on the rear brakes... I'm sorta thinking it's just stuck. I haven't decided how to proceed. Drive it a bit and see if it goes off? It does stop...

Dropped again. Still not anywhere near reasonable. :rotf:

That camo job looks familiar, might have belonged to another member at some point?

I think the engine/trans/tcase would swap easily enough. I didn't check what tcase that is, but if it's anything with a VC I wouldn't bother. It's generally fairly easy to bolt other NP/NV tcases to a GM tranny. I don't know what that rear axle is, but chances are it's the wrong bolt pattern, wrong width, and you would be farther behind trying to adapt that suspension than to just start with a blank page. And the 'G80' typically is a clutch pack limited slip (maybe with a bizarre flyweight arrangement).

I have an alignment diagram in my FSM, it's what you actually want I think... I will post it at some point, but it's in all the FSMs. Just some simple points to measure from and if it's not okay, it's not okay. All measurements are always in millimeters on these things.

Check with your insurance company and local bylaws before getting excited. My insurance company is decent, $50 premium for having a solids burning appliance, and no bylaw issues. Drive 10 minutes into town and its a totally different story. Stainless double (or triple) wall chimney pipe gets expensive in a hurry too. As said, Vermont castings makes some nice little stoves. There's also some retardedly expensive stoves out there for boats and such, which are meant for very small spaces. The reality with burning wood is that you have to add wood on a regular basis, you can't just choke a big stove down to heat a small space for a long period, as it will smoulder and build creosote. So if you throw a large stove in that area you will be making a lot of heat to keep it burning properly, and going through a lot of wood. A space heater of some sort is much easier, and same goes for gas heaters or fireplaces. You can't just decide you want to sit in the sun room, light your wood stove, and sit down and enjoy the fire, it takes a fair whack of time between lighting and actually getting a decent burn that will make good heat. But, if a guy needs something to do they're a good choice.

The AW4 is a great transmission. But I would never consider it while doing a 5.3L swap. GM started making really good OD transmissions by the time they rolled out the 5.3L. The 4L60E is fairly flawless behind that engine, and there is some other options if you want to go more HD or not, all with no adapters required. Also, GM offered a variety of transfer cases, most of which are as good or better than the old NP231J/AMC.

I swapped the front coils out for the RE ones. One of the coils that was in there was broken. Swapped the Bilstein shocks into the front too. Then went for a little drive. Brakes really need to be bled again. I'm thinking the front brakes too, as in doing it properly this time, I just bled the back because I did not touch the front and kept a pair of vicegrips on the rear hose while it was disconnected. Thinking about it the brakes didn't really work at all when I drove it into the shop, so chances are the fronts are screwed too. I should just do the front hoses while I'm at it. Might have to bleed the clutch too, or I'm just not used to it and this tranny. I won't be jumping all over that in a hurry. The headlight switch is also on its way out. I should pull it out and clean/lube it before I write it off, otherwise I will need to see if I still have a spare. Otherwise everything seems okay so far... Still gotta do a bunch of stuff.

The threads on those ubolts look to course to be factory to me, but I couldn't say for sure. I have a set that I just cut off here which I could look at, but I also couldn't guarantee they were factory.

One thing about mounting the ram to the diff cover is it tends to make the cover leak... Not sure how much you care, but I built a bracket by the inner C on the long side when I did my XJ, to avoid mounting it to the cover.

Nice you got that 8.8 fixed back up. That's pretty normal when you get inside something that more is worn out than initially planned.

Bent. I'd say it was overtorqued to begin with, and the spring plate couldn't take it, which caused the ubolt to bend. Some bending of both the spring plate an ubolts is normal, as deforming the ubolt permanently is part of the torquing process, but that is really bent and IMHO unsafe.

Turns out I didn't need to leave town, work cancelled on me, so I got a little more done on this and managed to get the rear brakes hooked up. Mockup of how it's hopefully going to look: Image Not Found Gotta swap some parts in the front suspension (coils, track bar, might try to get some caster shims in for now), bleed the rear brakes again (dunno what went wrong, the calipers being upside down doesn't make it easy though), fix a few other little things, maybe put the rear flares on and try to straighten the terrible rear bumper out a bit, then get some insurance.

Might be time to organize a group buy. I suspect a lot of our members would be interested. If there was a market for them (which there probably is...) somebody could bring a whole seacan in and sell them off over time.

Link to it?

Turns out the hoses are metric, which I suspected, but I couldn't get a metric line to thread into them in the parts store. Damnit, my fault it stripped. Will reevaluate tomorrow.

One of the rear brake hoses I bought was bunk, stripped out the threads before I could get it to seal. I highly doubt there will be on in stock anywhere near here. Pretty much screwed all chances of having this thing driving for the next couple weeks.

My ecm got water damage, if its not a late model one then why would someone write that on there? It might have been in two or three different vehicles by now. Who knows.

Well, that first picture isn't exactly what a guy wants to see. How corrosive was the water?

No clutch packs or VC in the 242, so yeah, you can put an additive in it. Personally I'd probably resort to synthetic 0W30, or Amsoil 5W30 Synchromesh (which allegedly if thinner than Dex or +4 below 0*F), but I would do more research first. I know lots of guys with diesel trucks do something along these lines as it seems to help. Also, while I have limited use for AA's technical advice, they always say to put RTV or Formagasket on the speedo drive o-ring... Given the case it already screwed, I'd goop it up with either without a second thought.

That's too bad. My condolences to his family and friends. :(

Like I said, the XJ harness has a second plug for the wiper motor for the rear hatch. I've never considered looking, but I could see (some/all) MJ harnesses having it even though it wouldn't be used.

I put the tcase back in, which meant I had to fix the shifter. I went through my pile of tcases to see if I had a style of arm that bolts to the tcase that would work better, and I didn't really, so I decided to make one. Image Not Found I put two holes in it for no reason. If it didn't work on the top hole then it wasn't going to work. The throw ratio is 1:1 using the stock gated shifter, which is what the upper hole is. Installed: Image Not Found The rod ends are actually from some tailrotor pitch links, they aren't worn out so I'm guessing I got them from something that crashed. The threaded rod is stainless, left over from one of the JB twinstick kits I bought. Anyways, seems to work good. It might disengage under torque, if so it's because the motor mounts are a little soft and will go on my next order. Also, the random driveshaft I had hanging up on the wall fits perfectly in the rear. Which is what I was really hoping. Front and rear driveshafts are bolted back in so this thing is officially 4wd for the first time in, umm, ever?

I wanted to say that but he said it doesn't... XJ harness with a pigtail for the rear wiper pump?