DirtyComanche

Made some progress on the rear cab mounts. I decided to reuse the Dodge stuff, which may or may not be a good idea. Marked the old mid mount for recycling: Bucked it off, cut it down, and hard tacked it in place where it should be: Other side: I'll clean up the remains of the crap on the frame sometime later. This looks pretty hideous right now, but everything has to come apart/go together multiple times, so there's plenty of opportunity to grind things clean later. I left the part of the mount that holds the ebrake cable as I figured I might need that later, of course I did get a little heavy handed with the plasma... The mounts will need a little extra work once I know I want them there, and have the cab off, etc, but for now they're in.

If it seems like I haven't been posting much, it's because I've been busy with this time/money/emotion pit. I bought this thing out of a field for $500. I think I paid about $600 too much for it. It actually looked like a real truck when I bought it. It didn't come with a title. Or a box. Or run. Or pretty much most of the other things you might want in a truck. The day it came home: I think we dated the tires from being molded in '78. Anyways, I managed to appease the Gods of ICBC and get a title for it. It only cost me half of what I overpaid for the truck. So that meant the project was a go at that point, no matter how little sense it made. From there I took the whole thing apart and realized I had bought well, umm, a rusted cab, a bent hood, fenders that couldn't be fixed, and a torch cut header/valence panel. BUT, it had a Rhino grill, and the title said it was a Gladiator! With visions of Marcus Aurelius shouting "ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED!?!" I began the process of scrounging parts. Enter the Dodge donor. This was a 99 Dodge Ram 2500 with the Cummins diesel and a slush-o-matic tranny. It didn't owe me a dime. Or anyone. I had it on a third world maintenance program for years, and finally parked it when the doors rusted to the point you could unlock them from reaching through them from the outside. For those that remember, I rolled a 99 Dodge, that was the truck that replaced this one since it actually still had a body. Anyways, here's the frame washed and back in the shop: Luckily the Cummins had slobbered enough oil on it that it preserved the factory paint on the front portion. The rest of it is a little rusty, but nothing to worry about. And I squared up the cab with some fenders I'd found on it and blocked it on the frame to build mounts: Oh, and the previous owner of those fenders wanted the emblems off them, so he cut the entire area around the emblem out with an angle grinder... The other fender is worse.

It's probably too bad I deleted my account in protest. I still have all the pictures, somewhere, but I haven't found the time to rehost and fix them.

Loop the vent hose around the tank and it stops that.

I don't really see the point in that... I've never thought "Jeez, I need to signal a ship on the other side of the Pacific" or "Damn would it be nice to have a tan in January" or "That whole dark side of the moon thing really bothers me." YMMV

That's assuming it still works. I've never seen one that did.

Why would you need to heat hot water?

Yeah, get new upper control arms. Honestly hate to tell you, but at 4.5" a long arm setup would be way better. I've got 3.5" RE coils in mine and hate the hammering feeling from the control arm angle, although I don't hate it enough to make it a priority to do anything about it. I was actually holding off on replacing the UCAs because I was going to build a long arm setup, eventually I saw Amazon had RE adjustable ones on sale for way too cheap so I just bought them.

Most (all?) 2wd driveshafts have a rubber elastomeric coupler in them to dampen vibration, and they do not lend themselves to modification. Just have shaft built by a reputable shop. Tom Woods, JE Reel, High Angle Driveline, etc. And if you want a SYE, now is the time to do it (I no longer will partake in debates on this subject, I have one personally).

It depends how mechanical you are and what you expect from the truck. It has over 300000 miles. The engine might just spin a bearing tomorrow, or the tranny might grenade a gear, or the D35 rear end might blow itself into 50000000 pieces. And yes, the electrical oddities might lead to needing a fusebox. Or just cleaning some contacts/chasing grounds/etc. I wouldn't be worried personally, but I've wired vehicles from scratch. Also, there's no vacuum pump on that truck. He probably replaced some vacuum hoses and the reservoir though. Most likely the heat wasn't working anymore...

Also, Grote now sells DOT approved LED headlights that will fit our trucks, and apparently they're pretty good. No link because I'm lazy.

Link was to eBay.ca and your phone didn't know better to flip it to the .com version. It was quoting you shipping to Canada. And at $50 to ship to Canada they can shove the bulbs up their rearend sideways.

I believe somebody on Pirate4x4 called the guy, and he said he would take $7000 that day. He knows its overpriced badly and is just fishing. Besides, it's got a freaking Peugeot.

If you had a Youtube channel dedicated to modding Jeeps with 20k+ subscribers and regularly pulling in 40K views per video, I bet they would, assuming you promised to only speak positively of their products. Or if you competed regularly at events they might consider it, but I wouldn't expect a lot out of them for that as they aren't really marketing to the higher performance crowd and I suspect they already have as many people sponsored as they would like for that. Otherwise they aren't going to care. They're an established company, the return vs cost for sponsoring some random person is simply not there. I've never been sponsored. I have friends that were/are, and it's something of a pain in the @$$, the sponsor will wind up dictating what can be used in the build in exchange for providing only certain parts of the build or parts at a discount/cost. One of my friends wound up running an original Elocker because of his sponsor, and he lost races due to the reliability issues they had.

He might need a large slide hammer too... Or to push the hubs out using a punch/bolt and the power steering. Personally I normally just use the slide hammer. I antiseize the hub bore in the knuckle when reassembling. They come apart easier the next time that way. No point changing the whole knuckle unless things are really mangled on the knuckle itself. That said, the early 'windowed' knuckles are the weakest of the lot, and I regret not throwing later knuckles on my axle for a couple reasons.

I'm not.

Schrodinger and his damn cat has visited this thread.

Looks like a solid starter. The PO probably meant they put a "long block" in it (remanufactured bottom end), as opposed to an "iron block" as all 4.0s are iron. But, you never know. 87 is a Renix injection engine. Hope you own a multimeter.

Video doesn't play for me, but I'm running NoScripts so that's normal. Looking at the spec list the thing I find weird is swapping a NSG370 in. I rate the thing barely higher than the SM465, and certainly below the AX-15. I guess the AX-15 wouldn't likely be happy with the power they're making, but there would be better choices.

No, that AA kit won't fix your problem. Or I don't think it will. The YJ/TJ mount is located differently than the XJ, and the assembly is not interchangeable (or not intended to be). I actually was going to try using a TJ mount for my AX-15, but it looked like the crossmember wasn't going to hit any of the correct holes on the uniframe, and it was probably going to put the driveline way too high in the tunnel. As far as the crossmembers go, they are all the same EXCEPT the AX-15 version (and maybe the NV3550, I've never seen one though). The AX-15 version has a 1"~ dropped section in the middle of it for more clearance. You don't actually need the AX-15 crossmember when swapping in an AX-15, but there's a but on that. With my 88 I used an AW4 crossmember (or whatever, the non-AX-15 one), partially intentionally because you can tuck the driveline up that extra inch without huge issues, it may rub some things and you might have to clearance the shifter hole some. However, I also converted an AW4 mounting plate into an AX-15 one (welding required), since I didn't feel like finding one and was in a hurry, and I may have built it a little out of spec compared with an actual one. It wound up moving the driveline even higher (maybe another half inch), and I've had to trim the shifter hole and the actual shift tower, plus there's some other rubbing... Just track down the right parts from a junkyard and it will all go together without hassle. Don't be like me.

If you want to save it, just weld a nut to it and back it out. Shock cool it or wick some wax into it if it's really stubborn. But as said, it's a strap yoke, not really worth bothering.

100%, and they had "square headlights" so they weren't real Jeeps, were a disgrace to the brand, and everything about them sucked and their owners were a bunch of [insert derogatory stereotypes].

Wish I owned something as nice as one of those!

Until Jeep builds something and uses LJ as the production code. IMHO they should have just referred to it as a TJU like the whole JK/JKU thing, yeah, I know they didn't realize at the time... but it would make more sense.

Yeah, but not LJ. I think I'm satisfied that I was correct that "LJ" was entirely fabricated by owners and picked up on by the aftermarket to differentiate the TJ from the TJ Unlimited.