Minuit

Hey A-Man, just to prove I'm actually doing something... The RCA preout voltage of the 56009004 is just under 0.6V (that's peak-peak) with a 60Hz test tone with the volume cranked all the way, higher if you turn up the bass and treble knobs. That's better than what I was expecting, but still lower than the vast majority of aftermarket headunits. Still, most amps ought to be able to cope with that I think, but you'd have to turn the gain up higher than with an aftermarket radio. For those who don't follow my thread in the Vendors forum, I will have a prototype radio with RCA pre-outs quite soon. In fact, it's a clapped out 56009004 with all sorts of problems. If I get good results on my own setup, I'll be looking to build a more worthy radio for this, and possibly getting a few trusted volunteers' opinions. Side note: I hate you guys for making me poke through car audio sites to do my research for this. Let's just say that we're spoiled here on CC :rotfl2:

I suspect that since discs need more fluid pressure than drums, this would give too much rear braking on a factory drum setup?

From the '91 electrical manual. °C and °F are mixed up. Guess the editor hadn't had his coffee yet :rotfl2:

1. There's really no Cruiser's Tips equivalent for the HO years because for the most part they don't need it. Do you have any specific electrical problems? You can always clean the dipstick tube and fuel pump(behind the LH tail light) ground as a matter of preventative maintenance. I don't remember if you said anything in your build thread but have you checked the fuse box? Any evidence of clutch fluid leakage to the interior should be cause for extreme concern. 2. The HO cooling system is a huge improvement over the Renix cooling system and does not need to be modified to work properly. It is an "open" system and is conventional in every way. Don't believe the temp gauge until you've verified it. Believing the gauge's lies has caused many people including myself to "fix" problems that don't exist or not realize problems that really do exist. I would say the hood being hot after a drive is normal especially if your truck didn't have the hood insulation, but "hot to the touch" is different for everyone. My truck runs at a very consistent 205 and and my upper hose feels hot (to my hands, anyway) after driving. Pointing an accurate infrared thermometer on the thermostat housing/upper radiator hose area will tell you all you need to know. You can also backprobe the temperature sensor on the thermostat housing to see what the ECU is reporting the temperature as. It's a thermistor and I can dig up the resistance vs temperature chart if you want. The fan should come on at roughly 220F, but that's ECU temperature and not gauge temperature. If you need to replace the gauge senders, use Mopar senders only! Aftermarket ones are wildly inaccurate - ask me how I know. If you decide to change the thermostat, use the Mopar part only. Side note: you don't necessarily HAVE to backprobe the thermostat housing sensor but I wouldn't recommend unplugging it with the engine running. It throws an instant check engine light and puts the ECU into what I can only describe as "OH $#!&" mode. Probably not great for the oxygen sensor or cat. 3. Normal. Mine has made a faint "whuuuuuum" sound for the last 5 years. Aftermarket pumps especially can be very loud. If it starts making a growling noise, worry then. 4. I won't muddy the waters here. 5. The football isn't an evap canister. It's a vacuum reservoir for the climate control system. You can relocate the football to the engine bay if you so desire, but if you're not experiencing a leak I wouldn't. That adds more clutter to the engine bay, not less. The line going to the football can cause problems sometimes as it's very long.

The only good thing about a 2.8 Comanche is that you can readily swap a 3.4 into it, which STILL leaves you with an inferior engine to the 4.0. With that said, I've seen some 2.8 Jeeps with ridiculous amounts of miles on them. No idea how many engines it took to make it that far though.

Welcome to the Vendors forum, thread! I asked for this thread to be moved so that I wouldn't be constantly covering up someone's For Sale ad with my updates about my fledgling little radio business. I won't be bumping this thread when I add a radio up for sale - I'll just keep the OP current. I took a week off from working on radios (illness), but I'm back now. I just finished a 7519 AM-FM radio for a CC customer. In the coming weeks I plan on building a prototype radio with RCA pre-amp outputs. In my head for the moment these will be 2-channel only - the only real consequence should be that the fader won't do anything. If all goes well expect these to roll out by late July. I would like to try these out with setups other than mine, so if you have an amp in your vehicle and would be interested in trying out a prototype, let me know. I'll also be experimenting with some custom modifications - LEDs and maybe Bluetooth are on the list. I might also play around with changing the color of the LCD display. I have added aux input to a total of 3 AM-FM radios, and the customer who has installed theirs gave a glowing report. I'll be adding the basic DIY procedure to the writeup that accompanies this thread as well as some pics of my own work.

The paperback reprints aren't super durable in my experience. Be gentle with them or the bindings will start to separate. The quality of the actual prints are just fine though.

Blue gauges, '84-'87. Many people including myself think they look a lot better. Found in both MJs and XJs. The '87 version is unique - the speedo will work with the "late" style speedometer cable with the plastic clip, and that the tach usually works better and is also adjustable for 4 or 6 cylinders. The gauges like to read too low and especially on '84-'86 versions the tachs can act funky. The speedometer, temp, and oil pressure gauges are the same as the "3/4" cluster with every gauge but the tach. "Red" gauges: '88-'96. I never knew there was such a thing as a gauge needle puller. Bet that would probably work a lot better on the Jeep gauges than what I was doing. Tim, if you need any spare gauges I have plenty of junk Renix gauge clusters.

When I bought my blue full cluster the oil pressure and temp gauges did exactly the same thing yours do. I've tried to remove the needles from gauges to swap faces, and I was never successful. I ended up breaking every gauge I tried this on, and even if it did work there's really no way to "index" the needle so it reads properly - the needles just slip onto a tiny shaft. I ended up replacing the individual oil pressure and temp gauges with ones from an '88 "3/4" cluster and they work just fine. They're the exact same gauges as the ones in your blue full cluster.

You won't have the trip meter.

They used them in early 87 also, with the 87+ plastic clip-on speedometer cable. That's the one you'll want, and you can adjust the tach as well.

I also forgot to mention that at some point during the above my A/C completely $#!& the bed in a span of about 2 weeks. Symptoms were a loud hiss coming from the dash, as well as an unusual smell. For the past years my A/C system has worked on the following cycle: - Throw money at shop to repair fault. - System works well for 5-7 months; surprisingly well for a converted 134a system, in fact - Meanwhile, compressor decorates serpentine belt and rest of engine bay with PAG oil via its front seal - Gradually notice decline in cooling performance over a period of weeks. - HVAC system fails in a new and exciting way - Repeat I'm frankly tired of spending at least $200 a year to have it "professionally" fixed by the highly trained button pressers at the shops in my town, so this year we're going to do this once and do it right. I have already procured a NOS evaporator, and will soon be ordering the rest of the parts to totally rebuild this A/C system including a new Sanden compressor, parallel flow condenser, and R-134a compatible barrier hoses when available. I briefly considered charging with R-152a, but for this build I'll be sticking with plain old R-134a. R-12 was not even up for consideration for a number of reasons. Using a parallel flow condenser should improve performance, and I was fairly satisfied with the original converted system's performance anyway. Of course, my plans to POR-15 the floors and soundproof the whole interior top to bottom are still going to happen. I won't be starting until I've collected all of the parts, so I'll be starting a little later than expected. Fun fact: Our Jeeps use expansion valves and receiver/driers in the A/C system, which is usually something you only see in more "premium" vehicles. All of my other stuff (even my mom's 2004 Cadillac) use accumulators and capillary tubes.

:rotfl2: Just what I was thinking.

When I was dealing with out of round Cooper Discoverer AT/3 tires I took the truck to a total of 4 tire shops, and only the last one cared enough to tell me that two of my tires were visibly out of round, and that was after I took the truck right back because it suddenly shook worse after their balancing. It actually looked a lot like this: And of course, the tire shops just put a bunch of weight opposite the runout, and of course that didn't improve anything. Tire shops are scum. Don't trust them as far as you can throw them.

Regarding that radio, if you don't want to keep it I'd be more than willing to buy it from you. They're good when working, but the "working" part is always the problem with 26 year old electronics that sit in the heat all of the time.

Hm, interesting. If you look at the '91 parts on Rockauto it says pretty much all of them are 91-93. If you look at the '89 parts, it says some are 87-90, some are 91-96, and some even further. So it looks like the compressor and evaporator core are for sure different, but who knows on the other stuff. Interchange databases make me want to pull my hair out :fs1: My parts book agrees with Ataki's part numbers BTW.

I have seen early ZJs with the 231. Don't know if they dropped the option later on since I haven't seen a 231 in a late ZJ.

I'll be watching this very closely as I'm in the beginning stages of doing exactly this on my truck. If I'm recalling correctly most if not all of this stuff is different from the Renix years. I'm also interested to see if anyone has anything to say about that "extreme duty" condenser. Is it actually more efficient than the original or just typical aftermarket BS?

If it's an 89 with the 242 there's a chance it could have the murderous Bendix ABS system on it. Just something else to watch out for. The way you tell is that the Bendix system doesn't have the usual brake booster.

http://www.rockauto.com/en/moreinfo.php?pk=451384&cc=1181775&jsn=366 I have a reprint set but they aren't bound very well. I'd try to find originals.

No way. $1500 absolute max if there isn't a single spot of rust anywhere on the shell. I'd want to see pics from the other side of the floor pans.

Yeah, I agree totally. The black panels look a lot better than I thought they would, and it's a nice match with all of the other black stuff. Hopefully Don won't kill me but I think the chrome switch bezels look kinda tacky personally. There's some older aftermarket decks like this one that would probably look pretty good in an MJ, but a lot of those don't have modern features like AUX either.

Uh, so where was I? :hmm: I meant to come back and finish that update a couple of days later, but obviously that never happened. As I prepare to take the truck off the road AGAIN, here's the update that should catch us up. For a time reference, the last update happened right before I left for the Spring 2017 semester at school, and this update will be things that happened, mostly on weekends, during it in my free time. I do actually have to drive my truck, so the level of work I can do is kinda limited. The reason for the long hiatuses is because I divide my time roughly 50/50 between working on my stupid little trucks and doing boring stuff like this: Yuck. My MJ Needs More Chinese Electronics: January-May 2017 Anyway, when we last left off I was just finishing up the power window and lock swap. I figured a keyless entry system would be the perfect way to tie everything together, so after some failed experiments adapting various GM keyless modules to my truck I bought the cheapest aftermarket one I could find. Mostly because the remotes only have two buttons and don't look like some kind of alien laser gun, and I'm a stickler for stuff like that. I briefly thought about adapting the $#!&ty infrared OEM keyless system for novelty's sake, but that got shelved as soon as I found out that the remotes have a street price of almost $70! In typical Chinese product fashion, you have to test it to make sure it works before you do anything else. Thankfully, this one works! The instructions were Chinglish and not even the funny kind, so I had to resort to Amazon reviews to figure out how to install the bloody thing. If you're interested in this unit, just read the Amazon reviews. They do a better job of explaining how this works than I do. Jeep power lock systems of this vintage use a positive trigger to activate the locks, so I tapped power off of the passenger courtesy light. I figured that if I ever wanted to remove the keyless system, replacing the light was easy enough. The yellow wires are the supply wires for locking/unlocking and the red wire is 12V+ for the receiver itself. To tap into the dome light I made a 3-into-1 splice to the green wire, into a 2-into-1 splice on the courtesy light's positive wire, which is always hot. Fun fact: many dome/courtesy lights are ground side switched. I don't see any reason why this would add any notable load to the 10A fused dome light circuit as this thing is drawing maybe 200 mA when you lock or unlock the doors. It's just triggering relays. The actual power for the lock actuators comes from the fusebox on a 30A fused circuit. Here is the connector that would normally go to the keyless entry receiver on an XJ. Its three wires are ground, unlock trigger, and lock trigger. I made an adapter to adapt the keyless receiver to the other end of this connector, and just plugged the keyless module into the factory wiring. By the way, I swapped in the carpet out of the orange MJ I talked about earlier. It's kinda ratty, but the vinyl floor mat wasn't going to survive another removal, so it had to put it in for a while. I only paid a few bucks for it, so why not? I somehow don't have a picture of the keyless module installed. I velcroed it behind the passenger kick panel and ran its antenna under the A-pillar trim. Range is pretty good, I'd say about 30 feet or so. The module's harness had several wires I didn't need, so they were removed from the connector. The one stupid thing about this $16 keyless entry module is that you can't do lock or unlock twice in a row.. Before you can lock again, you have to unlock first. It's not a big deal, but it's annoying. A few weeks later I installed a BIG LAMP BRILLIANCE INTENSIFIER OF AUTOCAR, to make my headlights brighter of course. In English, that's a H4 headlight relay harness. Despite the, uh, poor first impression that the box left, this thing isn't that bad quality wise as long as you discard the relays it comes with. I wouldn't run high-powered bulbs on this thing as the wires are 16AWG if I recall, but for the stock rating bulbs I'll be using it'll be fine. I finally had to cave on my "don't connect a bunch of $#!& to the battery" policy. I used a spare christmas tree connector to attach the relays to the fender: Those relays are pretty infamous for being junk. I replaced them with some Jeep replays I grabbed at the junkyard. On this particular harness there's two ground wires. On both sides they lined up fine with factory grounding points. The harness gets snaked in front of the radiator. There's juuust barely enough room to squeeze it between the uniframe and the header panel to the other side. My transmission cooler hoses didn't make it any easier. The new plug gives you plenty of free length. The connectors aren't the most skookum thing I've ever seen but they're ok I guess. Overall this harness wasn't too bad. There are a few weird things about it, and it's obviously built to a price, but I doubt I could do better for the price. I noticed a slight improvement in light brightness, but the main benefit is taking the load off of the undersized and overly long factory wiring. Besides, you can only do so much with DOT sealed beam headlights and their "who cares where the light goes" beam pattern. I took before and after pics, but you can't really tell a difference in brightness through a phone camera that adjusts automatically. I then installed the Hella 003427811 Euro-code H4 composite headlight kit. I'd normally put in an Amazon link, but when I bought a kit from Amazon it showed up broken, sent through the mail in the retail box. The seller I linked on eBay packed it very well. Disclaimer: The linked headlight kit is not DOT compliant and is technically not legal to use on-road in the United States despite being much better and safer than just about any DOT approved product on sale today. I only drive this 2WD truck around on my 20,000 acre private farm, never on road. I'd never ever violate the poorly thought out and outdated auto lighting laws in the US. The Euro-code pattern beam is much more controlled and less likely to glare than the beam pattern used by sealed beam headlights. The high beam is much more focused than the sealed beam, akin to a driving light. There's also a raised portion on the low beams that's meant to light up road signs. Of course, that's if you use these headlights on the road which I would never ever do. The kit comes with everything you need - bulbs, dust covers, and lenses. Everything feels well made in this kit, and I highly recommend it having had it on my truck for a few months now. The Hella light is a little deeper than the sealed beam, but it didn't cause any problems. Stock sealed beam on left, Hella E-Code on right. Both on low beam. The Hella bulb is brighter and whiter than the sealed beam, despite being the same 55W low/60W high rating. The difference is hard to see against my garage door. On a totally hypothetical road, the E-code low beam would be a flat, even spread of light compared to the sealed beam's narrower "cross" shaped blob of light. The E-code high beam is focused straight ahead and reaches a very long way. On my farm I estimate I can see almost a half mile away clearly with the E-code high beams. A very worthy upgrade. If you haven't done the relay harness + H4 bulb conversion yet, do it! You will be very happy. The relay harness and the headlight kit cost about $100 in total. Make sure you aim the headlights properly! Here is a guide to doing so. I also bought a Snap-On MT2500 scanner to talk to both trucks. You Renix guys have Nick's Renix Engine Monitor these days, but us early HO guys are screwed. A Renix truck will need the JEEP-1 adapter, and an HO truck will need the CHRY-1 adapter for the ECM and the CHRY-2 adapter for the transmission. The Renix system only offers live data, but the 91-95 HO system offers basic trouble codes, and some bi-directional tests. If you want one I'd recommend snagging one soon, because the prices are going up on them. I pieced mine together from individual parts and have about $150 into it so far. I soon learned my NTK oxygen sensor with less than 15,000 miles on it was stuck and had set a trouble code. STUPID AFTERMARKET $#!&! This is getting very frustrating! The radiator fan code is because I've added a switch to control it. On HO trucks, the diagnostic connector is behind the air box, and on Renix trucks it's under those weird yellow covers. And then... my radio obsession started. I had installed a factory radio (a 1994-1996 56007214) last year, which had an extra clock and a display that would sometimes be backlit and sometimes not. Here it is in one of its very brief moments of working: (the LCD bulbs on these things are always either completely blown or barely hanging on by 2017) But what I really wanted was the original one for my truck, which would have a bright green display and no clock - instead, it would have a "DX" button that changes how sensitive the AM-FM tuner is. 1991s had their clock on the dashboard, but 1992 and later trucks had theirs in the radio, and I was getting tired of having to sync up the clocks on the dash and the radio, so I put out an ad for a radio with the part number 56002467. I got a few responses, one by a CC member named josehuerta. He had one out of a 1991 Pioneer, but it didn't work. I bought it anyway. When it arrived I was floored to see that it was in excellent condition, but didn't power up other than the panel lights. Not having anything to lose, I dug into it. The first problem was readily apparent, but you'll have to look hard to see the second problem. I fixed the burned PCB trace with a wire, which didn't fix it completely, but I noticed that the radio would now briefly blink to life if you tapped on the relay. When I took the pic, I still hadn't spotted it, but the eagle eyed viewers among you will notice the cracked solder joint just above the center of the pic. It turns out that tapping the relay would briefly make that joint make contact. A quick touching up of that solder joint later and... I was hooked. I'd never experienced the rush of fixing electronics before, but seeing my dead radio spring to life was a great feeling. It sounded awesome with a couple of speakers hooked up on the table too! I even got the tape player working! I quickly transferred over my aux input cable from the old radio and gave this reborn '91 radio a forever home in the dash of my truck. This is the one radio I will never, ever sell. The thing you need to know about factory Jeep radios is that they have excellent sound , but they struggle to keep up with the extreme road and wind noise my truck and most other MJs have. I wanted a little more volume, so I stuffed even more electronics into my truck: I needed something small so I could hide it, relatively efficient and low powered so I could run it with existing wiring, and able to accept speaker level inputs from my factory radio. The Alpine KTP-445U fits that bill perfectly with an advertised 180W of power at 1% THD, a big improvement over the ~35W that the factory radio is capable of. Side note: I find the blanket "factory radios suck" BS that car audio retailers spout and many people believe to not be true many times (counterpoint: certain 1.5DIN Chrysler radios are absolutely hopeless) Most of the weakness of factory sound systems is in the speakers, which really do suck most of the time. My 26 year old factory radio definitely sounds better than the Kenwood I had years ago and looks a million times better. Maybe I'm just an a$$hole, but 80% of the aftermarket headunits I see in older vehicles look horrible. I'm not against aftermarket radios, but I'm not having them in my own truck. In any case, the circuit in the picture looks like this in real life: Believe it or not, all of this wiring does actually fit behind the dash. If you use about a mile of electrical tape on it it even looks factory! If I do have one complaint about the KTP-445U it's that the input harness is way too short and the output harness is way too long for my application. I really should've shortened the output a bit. And then, while looking for radios to add to my collection, I mistyped a part number and came across NOS power window switch panels in black. I didn't need that $70 anyway. No, the black isn't correct for a 1991 vehicle, but I don't care. I think they look pretty good, tacky surface-rusty screws notwithstanding: I was cooped up in the house with a sinus infection for a few days, so naturally the wallet came out again. While browsing the UK eBay site, I found a gauge cluster with almost exactly my truck's actual mileage (it's just a little bit low): So of course I bought it and spent way too much on shipping. Note the 125mph speedometer. Note that the RHD British cluster is almost an exact mirror image of the American cluster, but you can swap parts between them. That's right, I bought an entire gauge cluster and shipped it across the Atlantic Ocean for the damn speedometer. Sadly, the temperature is in degrees celsius and the pressure is in bars, so you won't really be able to use anything else. On the bright side (for us), the UK pound is in the dump now at only $1.30 per pound so if you're going to buy stuff in pounds, now is a good time. These clusters are pretty simple to get into. Just remove the 4 screws holding the lens and faceplate on, and pull the knob off of the trip reset button, and then remove 3 screws on the other side of the speedometer. You'll notice that the US speedometer is taller than the UK speedometer, and that the screw pattern is a little different. Not to worry, the extra height on the US speedo is actually an adapter to switch between the US and UK screw patterns. Without it, the speedometers are identical from the back. Remove it and swap it from the US to the UK speedometer, and then put the UK speedometer in the US gauge cluster. Put the lens and face on, and you now have a 125mph speedometer in your US gauge cluster. It looks like it belongs! So, we're now caught up! In the coming months I have a lot in store, so expect to see an update about 3 months behind schedule, as usual. Thanks for reading!

Yeah, the long crank is just a characteristic of the Renix fuel injection system. You might be able to speed it up by cleaning up the connections as in Cruiser's Tips. My 89 had Cruiser's Tips done on it before I bought it and it starts up just a little slower than my HO. Of course, my HO sometimes lands on a lucky spot and starts up immediately but the Renix is pretty consistent in its slowness.

The red trim would look great on it I think.