Minuit

I've decided I'll be making that list into a DIY writeup with pictures and everything. Those are on the list, but were a late addition, so the DIY writeup version will have more detail and pictures. (they call 'em Zipties over here )

Here's some things to do. Should keep you busy for a while, with a focus on electrical performance and "the little things" that often get left out of lists like these. This list assumes that the mechanical necessities have been already taken care of and your truck is more or less roadworthy. Preventing fires Headlight relay harness (and throw the sealed beams in the garbage while you're at it) - everyone here will have a different opinion on what headlights to replace with, but almost all agree that the sealed beams are bad. My personal preference is Hella H4 housings, but anything is good here except cheap Chinese LED headlights with poor optics that will blind oncoming drivers. If your harness has those transparent relays, toss them and replace them with better ones. Inspect fan speed switch connector, replace if it shows signs of heat damage. Make sure blower motor spins freely, replace if needed. Excessive current draw from the blower motor is a common cause of damage to this connector, which eventually results in fire. Check ignition switch connectors for any signs of heat (signifying contact resistance and voltage drop at switch). Replace switch and connectors if any heat damage found. Remove the blower motor resistor and look inside the HVAC box for any flammable items that could've been put in there by rodents or birds. Someone from another forum I used to follow had a very nice 1990 Comanche burn down, probably from a mouse nest in his HVAC box that caught fire. Electrical performance Clean and seal all electrical connections. Not just the grounds. Everything. AMC loved using unsealed and otherwise crappy electrical connectors where they don't belong, so this is even more of a problem than usual for an old vehicle. Wire brush terminals until clean (or spray contact cleaner and plug/unplug it a couple of times), and apply sealant if the connection is exposed to the elements. I use dielectric grease for plastic connectors, and Fluid Film on ring terminals with bolts on them after fastening the connection. Side note: dielectric grease does not make the electrons go faster. It is an insulator. Its purpose is to prevent terminal fretting (vibration) and keep moisture out. I don't normally put it on interior connectors, but it wouldn't hurt anything. Particular points of interest are front headlight harness, power window/lock connectors (BIG breeding ground for green crusties) and any other unsealed electrical connector that can be potentially exposed to moisture. The wiring harness bulkhead on the other side of the fusebox and C101 connector if equipped are significant trouble spots. Clean the black tar goo out of them, clean contacts, and pack with dielectric grease. The wiring harness connector in particular is a major leak path into the cab, so special attention should be paid here. Make sure the battery posts and cables are clean! Replace the cables themselves if they show signs of deterioration. They aren't too hard to make yourself if you have a hydraulic crimper, or you can find a number of quality options online. Size the cables according to your electrical system demands. Renix owners should do all of Cruiser's tips that apply to their model year, in addition to the above. Buy a pallet each of non-lubricating contact cleaner and silicone dielectric grease and that would just about do one vehicle with some extra for periodic maintenance. Clean and seal the tail light bulb sockets. They were packed from the factory with what used to be some sort of dielectric grease that has hardened into a nasty waxy crud. This can cause intermittent operation of the tail lights. The sockets can be disassembled, cleaned, and put back together with new dielectric grease. Unless the socket is broken or melted, replacing it is not necessary. Adjust the glove box light and make sure it turns off when the glove box is closed! That's my personal #1 source of battery drain issues on these trucks. Good practice when modifying or adding to your electrical system Don't mess with a circuit you don't properly understand! Ask questions if you need to. If I hear about one more person who bypassed their pressure switch to "fix" their air conditioning... Don't use these stupid "vampire tap" connectors! They SUCK! The quality of the connection is poor, they permanently damage the wire you spliced into, and they invite moisture! Don't use these stupid plastic "insulated" butt connectors for making splices! They SUCK! They invite moisture and are overly bulky! Use the ones with heat-shrink instead, or use uninsulated connectors and add your own heat shrink. Don't even think about using wire nuts for a vehicle! They SUCK! They invite moisture, can vibrate free, take up way too much space, pull out too easily, and introduce an unnatural bend in the wire that makes them impossible to wrap neatly. Even if you live in your truck, it's not a house. Don't wire it like it is one. Don't use the wrong size wire splice connector! As a rule of thumb (with some variation between manufacturers), a red connector is for 18-22 AWG wire, blue is for 14-16 AWG wire, and yellow is for 12-10 AWG. While we're on crimp connectors, don't use pliers to crimp things! Buy a real crimper. I've used this one for tens of thousands of connections and it's still going just fine: https://www.amazon.com/Tool-Aid-SGT18980-Ratcheting-Terminal/dp/B008EW92LY/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=sg+tool+aid&qid=1601352169&sr=8-3 You will often find people who are militant about soldering electrical connections, and never crimping, or vice versa. They are wrong. Both have their strengths. Both have their limitations. Neither are easy to do properly and require practice and quality equipment for best results. If you plan to solder electrical connections, learn how to do a basic lineman splice! Use good quality solder (my preference is Kester solder) and use flux! The finished joint should be approximately as large as the wire. If your solder joint has blobs or "spikes" where you pulled your iron away, you either didn't use enough flux, didn't heat the wire enough, or used too much solder. I like very thin solder - it allows precise control of the amount you're adding to the joint. With regards to heat shrink, all exterior connections that may be exposed to the elements should get adhesive-lined heat shrink tubing. The non-adhesive stuff is fine for interior work that won't be exposed to moisture. Want to add an extra layer of refinement to your wiring work? Get some Tesa fabric wiring harness tape! The stuff is great for interior work and won't get gummy like traditional electrical tape. Properly protect your connections! If there is a chance for your wiring to rub against something, use properly sized split loom. Use fasteners to keep wiring from moving unnecessarily, especially if there are solder joints. Solder joints in wires are massive strain concentrators! Other stuff that will keep your truck happy (TL;DR: lubricate stuff) Lubricate moving parts, such as door/hood/tailgate hinges and linkages. If your locks get sticky, take the door card off and lubricate the door latch mechanism, which contains the parts for the lock. White lithium grease in a spray can is a good choice for this. The lock cylinders themselves can be lubricated with powered graphite lock lube. If your Renix speedometer bounces, pull the cable apart, clean it, and lube with white lithium grease. If you take a bolt out and it comes out hard, the threads are probably dirty. Clean that $#!& up before you put it back in. Invest in some thread chasers (or used taps) and use them to clean up threads. Give dirty bolts some time on a bench grinder if you have one, or hit the threads with a wire brush. If your windows are stiff (crank) or go up and down slowly (power), cleaning and lubricating the worm drive mechanism will keep them happy and healthy for a long time. Replacing the window regulator is not needed unless it is already stripped out. If it's just stiff, cleaning and lubing the "snake" inside will be fine. Use anti-seize or silicone brake paste on metal to metal contacts on both drum and disc brakes. This will reduce brake noise and keep brakes from sticking. For disc brakes, make sure the slide pins are lubricated. A gentle coat of lube is all that's needed. Adding too much can actually make things worse. Lubricate the spare tire hoist cable. Those things love to seize up when they're needed most. Make sure there's air in your spare tire! Make sure there's air in your other tires too! Check with every major temperature change. Make sure your lug nuts are torqued! Check every oil change or so. Don't put Ziebart or other rubberized undercoatings on your truck as a method of rust prevention. They will hide rust until it's too late. For rustproofing the underside of your truck, use something breathable and transparent like Fluid Film, Krown, or other transparent wax-based coatings. CHANGE YOUR BRAKE FLUID! That's the #1 cause of seized calipers and wheel cylinders. Regular DOT3 is fine unless you're going racing. Keep the bottle closed as the fluid readily absorbs moisture. DOT3 brake fluid absorbs moisture and eats paint for breakfast. DOT5 does not. Don't mix types of brake fluid!

Here's some hot and spicy drama for you: After I went to the hospital at the beginning of all of this, I was referred to Neurologist #1, one of three neurologists working as part of the hospital system in my town. After a couple of months, I got very tired of how hard it was to get in touch with Neurologist #1 (and the fact that I had to pretty much start at day one every time) and demanded a transfer to Neurologist #2 (with some difficulty, I might add - I actually had to get kinda nasty for them to transfer me). Why did I have so much trouble getting in touch with Neurologist #1? Out of the three neurologists in the hospital system, two of them quit suddenly, leaving Neurologist #1 with all of their patients that didn't transfer to an independent like I did. Well, the other day I got a letter from the hospital. They must have thought that I was still with Neurologist #1. The letter explained that Neurologist #1 has also quit, without any notice, and that they'd be happy to transfer me to any other neurologist, which I'd already done earlier. Which makes me wonder - what the hell is going on in that hospital system to make three neurologists quit in a couple of months? Also makes me glad I got out of there when I did. Also makes me feel better that I fired Neurologist #1 when I did, because if you can't do your patients the honor of at least saying something when you decide to quit your job, I don't want to have anything to do with you. It's just my independence and livelihood hanging in the balance here, no big deal. I will now exit my soapbox. I also just realized that the title of this thread is now a pun; the type of seizure I mainly suffer from these days are sometimes called "absence seizures"

Need it. (do you know a good label guy? I have some things I'd like to reproduce)

Upgrading from the sealed beam to *insert choice of non-sealed headlight here* is the real winner as far as brightness/visibility goes. If your existing wiring is in good shape, you shouldn't see much difference in brightness with just the harness. If you DID see a large difference in brightness, you had a significant voltage drop somewhere in the system and you better be glad your truck hasn't already set itself on fire. The safety of not passing full current through the switch is the real point, and for those so inclined, the ability to run higher powered headlights depending on how beefy the harness is. Of course, any diligent MJ owner should add the harness AND leave the sealed beams in the 80s where they belong. Now, in this pixie wrangler's opinion, the headlight system is just a good first step in the process of ensuring electrical safety - identifying any and all voltage drops, cleaning and sealing all electrical connections, and identifying any excessive current draws throughout the whole electrical system should be done. The headlights and blower motor are just the big ticket items that have destroyed some really nice trucks.

I have the full 91 FSM on PDF. PM me your email address and I'll send it to you.

https://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/view/19716/PHILIPS/TEA5500.html

Does it have a window in roughly the center of the chip? If so, dollars to donuts that's an old-school EPROM that is erased by shining UV light directly onto the silicon of the chip. Any pics? Miiiight be able to pull up a datasheet for it.

You definitely could. But you'd run into all sorts of FCC mumbo jumbo if you ever wanted to legally sell it (any halfway decent keyless entry being an RF transmitter-receiver) and you'd have way more man-hours into designing a circuit and PCB to fit there than you'd ever get back considering how much easier the alternatives are. and a perfectly good junkyard Camaro module can be made to fit anyway, and it's very easy to make an adapter harness to plug it straight into the factory wiring. and I had to cut out that part of the overhead console to get it short enough to fit the MJ's headliner anyway

If I had to guess based on my experience with test equipment of this age, the "code" is probably stored on an EEPROM or similar non-volatile memory chip. The remote likely has a similar chip, and it works by blinking a LED in a pre-programmed pattern, which the receiver compares to what's stored in its memory. That chip was probably programmed on a very expensive and rare machine. [1] Even if you had the equipment and knowledge to read and alter the programming, desoldering the chips can cause loss of memory or permanent damage. You'd have to be very careful. This is a very specialty electronics thing. To find people who know anything of the way it works, you'd probably have to luck out and find a retired engineer on a site like the EEVBlog forums who worked with similar systems back in the day. Frankly, I don't consider the system worth the effort of reverse engineering it. If someone has one of these modules kicking around (I did at one point, but hell knows where it is now), I guess I could take a look at it and try to figure out how it works, but that would have to be an absolute bottom priority task for me, because there wouldn't be any money in it and I wouldn't be able to find a personal use for it. [1]: All of this is conjecture, but I think it's as plausible an explanation as any considering I have little hands-on experience with the factory keyless entry's inner workings, but I do have a fair amount of experience working with equipment of this era.

Funny you mention that. We had a few buffalo get really, really close. And also, got some pictures of idiots being idiots and getting WAY too close to animals. A park ranger came by and yelled at them right after this picture was taken, thankfully. Some more pictures - picking out the good ones as I sort through them. For all that are curious, photos taken with a Canon SX50 point-and-shoot using manual settings by a crappy (AT BEST) photographer. For what it is, this camera has served me very well in the last 7 years or so. If anyone wants a full size version of any of these pics for a desktop background or something, lemme know.

I'm sure I'll end up getting one as part of this. Any recommendations?

I'm sitting at my desk at 8 PM doing nothing in particular, but I have two major projects coming up that will involve yanking most to all of the drivetrain components out of an MJ. For everything I've done to these trucks, I've actually never pulled an engine or transmission out of one. So - those of you who have done this, what's the best way? I have two scenarios: Assume I own or are willing to purchase any tools to make this easier except for a lift. 1) The '91 is currently 2WD. It will be getting a 4WD swap with a 4WD AW4 and NP242 transfer case. I would rather leave the engine in the truck. My question here has more to do with installing the 4WD transmission/transfer case. Is it best to leave the transmission and t-case connected or install them one at a time? Side note: are the torque converters the same for a 2WD and 4WD AW4? Asking in case I need to reuse the 2WD torque converter for some reason. 2) The '89 will be getting a complete drivetrain swap. Not sure of the specifics yet, but most likely a good used Renix 4.0 retaining all of the Renix features to make my life easier, and an external slave AX-15 backed up by an NP231. Since I'm basically building this truck from scratch and keeping none of the original parts, is it possible to remove and install the whole engine/transmission/t-case as an assembly from the top? If it is possible, is it easier than installing the engine and then mating the transmission up to it? Any insight is appreciated.

Doing the All Breeds trip last year really made me love doing long road trips in my MJ. Glad you had no major problems. The fire haze was pretty heavy in Billings, MT when I was there for a couple of weeks this month. Have to ask - screw type hose clamps, right? That'd be why I don't use those anymore.

I haven't had any issues with the mobile site (an older version of Firefox on Android from before they made it garbage, but that's another matter entirely) except for the CC logo being cut off. I haven't been doing much other than browsing, but that seems OK. Also a bug that would take me to the "adventure planning" forum when I wanted to go to the classifieds is fixed, so that's cool. However, the desktop site is really pushing one of my buttons here. Is there a way to get rid of this mostly useless window that takes up a big chunk of the horizontal space on the entire page of my thread? Only appears on a thread I have created, not others. Also, as a compulsive post editor, I really don't like the "edit" button being buried under a menu rather than next to the "quote" button. Is there a way to change this, at least on my end?

Sign me up for at least one of the 4.0-appropriate version.

I'll be doing a repeat of the 2019 trip, driving my 91 up and entering it in the show, if all goes well.

First of all: I have not had more seizures. Hey I disappeared again. Three weeks this time. Most of it with no access to a computer and quite a bit of it with literally no internet at all. Where was I? In the north for three weeks, where the vast majority of family (and family friends) I still keep in touch with live. For context, I live in TN, but more than half of my family live in North Dakota and surrounding areas. Those of you who have met me in real life will probably know that I really don't sound, look, or talk much like a Southerner. That'd be why. To be honest, I'd be lying if I said I was 100% happy to be back home. Why did I do this now, especially with current events and the torrent of radio orders that are coming in? I needed to get the hell out of the damn house for a while. This was also a family trip months in the making. Pretty much all activities were done outside with masks being worn when appropriate. So what did I do? Visting Yellowstone has been a bucket list item for years. Its unique features exist because you're standing right on top of an enormous volcano. The park is normally packed with tourists, but going in late September makes it a lot more peaceful, and the pandemic probably didn't hurt. Theodore Roosevelt National Park is pretty cool but Yellowstone blows it out of the water. Probably a lot more to see if you hike the trails, which I'd love to do someday. Yours truly, in "obnoxious tourist" mode: I also flew on some airplanes, Went to a musical, Rode a horse, Pet a really big dog, Pet a really fat Corgi, and stayed in a pretty cool log cabin hotel. (side note: there was literally no internet in this part of the country) Car reviews! 2020 white rental Toyota Camry: Professional car reviewers rave about how good this car is, but I'm not seeing it. The 4-cylinder engine sounds like a tractor, the seats aren't very comfortable, and the touchscreen infotainment system is obnoxious to use. Terrible offroad. Almost 40 MPG on the highway, and it's neither fast nor slow. I put a few miles on it for irrelevant reasons and it kinda reminds me of my 1996 Ford Thunderbird. Typically annoying electronic throttle, completely dead steering, and truly awful engine sound make it less fun to drive than my 24 year old grandma car. I didn't even take a full picture of it. It's a car. The base sound system sounds "meh" with artificially boosted bass. Fairly quiet on the highway with some wind noise. My Thunderbird on mileage-optimized tires is quieter. People talk about "don't let the internal combustion engine die" but if these are the kinds of gasoline engine cars that are going to be around in the future, I'll take my Tesla in black. 2020 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk: Owned by a family friend. I rode in this thing for almost 3000 miles. I like old Jeeps so I really wanted to hate this thing, but it's really not that bad. It's ugly, but completely competent otherwise. It had the 270hp 2.0L turbocharged 4-cylinder engine, which is one of the worst sounding car engines I've ever heard in my life. The seats are good enough and it's surprisingly fast. The optional brand-name sound system has at least one speaker and sounds adequate. But damn, it's ugly. Also, Sirius XM plays the same 20 songs over and over again, and by the end of the trip the repetition (regardless of the station) made me want to gouge my eyes out. The factory all-terrain tires are kind of noisy at low to medium speed. Probably better offroad than a Camry. One thing I noticed - the paint job is actually pretty nice. Lots of metal flake. I wouldn't spend 40 grand for it. So what do I have to look forward to? I need to work on cars, clean the gutters, pick out the good pictures (of over 1500), and do some other stuff. Radio orders will be finished when they're ready. But mostly, I need to get some sleep. I have extreme difficulty falling asleep, and air mattresses, hard motel beds, and people snoring make that even worse.

You're gonna have to make it from a sheet of foam. Junkyard ones are in just as bad of shape as yours is. Will post some suggestions once I have better internet access.

This is pretty much how the factory gasket is supposed to work before 30+ years of rot turned it to dust. As long as there aren't any gaps it should do the job just fine. If you still see leaks, the blower motor gasket at the firewall, HVAC pipe gasket, and the antenna are all very leak prone. They leak under the carpet though, which makes them harder to find.

I've got a few projects coming up that will require semi-precisely located holes drilled into mild steel and aluminum. I'd rather not do this with a hand drill, so that's got me looking at small, fairly cheap ($150 and under) drill presses. I don't have a huge amount of free space in my garage, so I'm mainly looking at portable ones meant to go on top of a bench. Does anyone have any experiences with these? Brands to avoid? Would the $70 Harbor Freight 5-speed cheapo do the job, or should I spend more? I'm not going to be working with big, thick, or hardened parts nor do I need extremely tight tolerances, so I don't think I really need much out of a drill press. A straight chuck and a fairly wide range of speeds is all I really need - anything else is just bonus points. Portability is a big bonus. Any thoughts?

87 might be too early for the ABS. It was only offered on XJs with the 242, which is what made me think of it. 99% of those systems probably got ripped out and replaced with something that works 20+ years ago. Never seen a working one.

2-door Laredo too, loaded. Would've been a nice jeep. At least its parts will live on. If I were sticking with the maroon interior on my 89 I'd be frantically mashing your PM button right now. Did it have the $#!&ty Bendix ABS system? Is it just me, or are '87 XJs way more likely to have a D44 than any later year?