Minuit

I predict that choosing to stick with the BA-10 is going to bite them in the @$$ in one way or another. Nice looking truck though. I really hope they don't mess it up bouncing it off rocks.

Remembered it exists!

That thing is sweet! I've never seen that color combination before but I definitely like it. What color is the interior? It would be a lot sweeter if the grille was the right way round though. Pull up the carpet. Let it be one of the first things you do. My 89 spent its entire life in the south and the driver side floor is gone. That's most likely because of a leaky clutch master cylinder, but you just never know until you see it with your own eyes.

... however, that doesn't rule out the possibility that the oil pump is just worn out enough that the oil could drain out of it over time, causing it to lose prime. I'm not loving the idea of tossing a pump at this questionable engine, but I'm not sure that would be something I'm able to detect. When I noticed the loss of oil pressure, I had not started the engine for a very long time. The more I'm thinking about it, the more this seems like what's happened. Kinda wishing I would've kept the 91's old oil pump about now. That thing had oil pressure immediately after sitting for something like 6 years without starting. Oh screw it, I'll just order a rebuild kit for the pump I've got. I need the gaskets anyway, and it's cheaper than buying a whole pump.

I probed the oil pressure sender area, and from what I was able to tell there wasn't any restrictions. Can't rule it out though. I packed the oil pump full of assembly grease and tried the drill priming trick again - the pump shot a column of oil about 2 feet high at me. The pump certainly doesn't seem to lack for eagerness, I'll say that. I've got half a mind to just throw it back together and see if I can get the pump to prime installed on the engine. I'll have to make a gasket though - can't get just the gasket by itself.

This is after removing a handful of fingernail sized pieces of junk. All of them were hanging out on the bottom cover of the screen, some of them wedged in the "hump" in it. It didn't look stopped up to me, but who knows?

This one made pretty decent oil pressure at cold start, not so great oil pressure once warm... and then one day I went to start it and it had absolutely nothing. I have every reason to believe the pump was in good shape, at least before the sudden loss of pressure. As to RTV getting into the pump, I definitely can believe it. I'm not too sure what it was in there, but let's just say this truck has been worked on by some careless individuals. Lots of hackjobs on this one. Lots of random loose bolts and other stuff. The gasket was cork with blue RTV, and I can definitely imagine a piece breaking off and getting into the pump pickup. There's also some sludge in the old pan right under where the pump sits.

LIVE UPDATE! As live as it can be, anyway. Oil pan's off, and here's what I know so far. - The engine had plenty of oil in it. - The oil pan came off with absolutely no fuss. 3 hammer blows and it was off, most likely because the oil pan gasket has been changed. It maybe took an hour to get the pan off, including jacking it up. - There were no chunks of metal in the oil pan, nor was there a pickup screen sitting in the bottom. - A few of the rod bearings are questionable at best. - There was no gasket between the oil pump and engine block. - I found some solid material (RTV? Pieces of gasket? It wasn't metal) in the pickup screen, but it didn't look to me like enough to stop it up. - The oil pump impellers are not damaged and spin freely. I did get it to pump a little bit of oil by spinning it with a drill. Any thoughts? I'm going to get a bite to eat and go to the post office, and then I'm going to give the pickup screen a closer look. The biggest clue I have so far was the unknown crud in the pickup, but it's still not enough that I would expect the pickup to be completely plugged. Remember, this thing had 0 oil flow at the pressure sender suddenly.

While you're at it, grab an extra passenger side bottom cushion to put on the driver's seat. The foam will be in much better shape. A cushion from any style of 84-94 seat will work. You might know that already, but I thought it was worth putting out there.

Damn, you're ruthless. I'll know within the next couple of weeks. I'll do my absolute best to make it.

The black covers are, I think, "mesa" fabric. They're what I call the "basic" bucket seats. They do not have the extra side bolsters. That won't be a problem, because the bolsters just screw on. The grey seats are "Luggage" fabric, and are the "wingback" bucket seats. They use exactly the same underlying frame as the basic buckets, but with a different foam pattern and added bolsters. TL;DR, they will fit if you use the foam from the black seats (or any basic bucket seats) and remove the bolsters. 4dr parts will work if you clearance them for the flip lever. Parts can be swapped side-for-side with no issue. I did the opposite of what you're going to do to make my "eliminator" seats. You're pretty much going to be swapping all of your black seat's parts onto the Eliminator frame. On the left is a basic, flip-forward bucket seat. On the right is a wingback 4dr XJ seat. As far as you're concerned, they're the same. Stripped vs. fully assembled flip-forward seats: This is the flip-forward seat with the bolsters added, and the 4dr XJ covers and foam.

Ordered a new oil pan + gasket for the '89. Probably going to yank the pan off this weekend to see what carnage awaits. Thought about taking the front bumper and radiator support off of the '91 to paint, but decided not to.

Getting Sidetracked: April 2019 Can't turn back now. Cliffs notes: I spent the weekend designing a circuit board that does a handful of different things. It provides a digital volume control with 32 logarithmically spaced positions, balance control (via pressing both volume buttons at the same time), a 12V power antenna driver, and the real party trick, automatic detection of and switching to an auxiliary input signal. If this project goes well, some of this tech might be finding its way into future JRE products. To quote Bad Obsession Motorsport, the customer on this job is a bit of an arse who thinks he can have everything, so I'll be trying my damnedest to fit this into the radio without having to remove the cassette mechanism. We'll see how that goes. The PCB is quite small, at roughly 60x33mm, which is almost as small as it could possibly be if all of the components were touching. The radio chassis may have to be "expanded" to make it fit, but that's a bridge we'll cross if and when we get there. Hopefully it all works when it gets here in 1-6 weeks! I put this together in a couple of days without having it reviewed, so hopefully I didn't screw up too much. I ordered 10 boards, so the possibility of making copies of this Frankenstein's monster of a radio is on the table.

Looks like your square Jeeps are multiplying even faster than they normally do. From one to four in only a couple of years. That's impressive!

Someone on here will have one. That's about the only place you can find them anymore, other than a junkyard.

I don't have an answer for you, but I will say that every Jeep 4.0 I've listened to in person has had this noise to some level. My '91 has always sounded similar to your cold start video but not quite as loud. It too has good oil pressure and the lifters on it seemed fine when I had the valve cover off recently.

If those numbers are accurate, those are good numbers.

Is It Even a Jeep Anymore?: January-April 2019 If this is what passes for a big update these days, my project truckin' credentials are in trouble. However, I'd like to extend a slightly belated happy 28th, truck! At 12:55 PM on April 17, 1991, this truck was completed at Toledo North, and the world was never the same.. That also means that I've been doing my thing for 7 whole years. Damn. That's a long time. I've had a 96+ 4.0L valve cover hanging around since at least 2013. I couldn't sleep one night, so I decided I was going to throw it on. This is an almost direct bolt-on swap. You'll use the 96+ valve cover gasket and CCV elbows. The newer CCV elbows connected right up to the rest of my piping. On a Renix truck, you'll need to do a little more, but on HO engines it is as easy as it could possibly be. The front CCV tube isn't exactly right, but it definitely fits. I also took this chance to give the engine bay a little bit of a cleaning. It doesn't clean up so bad for having 28 years and 176,000 miles under its belt. A little scotchbrite on the aluminum parts and it'd almost look good! The new valve cover also comes with a nifty but extremely fragile plug wire holder. I'm no pro at dressing out plug wires, but I tried. Not long after posting the last update, @JMO413 got in touch with me and tracked down the A/C label I was talking about: I put it on the firewall because I figured I'd destroy it in short order if I put it on the correct location, the radiator support. Plus, my radiator support has looked a little scabby for the past 7 years and I need to take it off to paint at some point in the future. The next incredibly minor thing on the list: I wanted a low washer fluid sensor. That's a pretty simple ordeal - the truck is wired for it already, and the installation procedure is quite simple: "drill hole in top of washer bottle." The only remotely difficult thing would be finding the sensor itself, or so I thought. It turns out that at least 50% of CC has one to spare, and I had several offers for sensors and complete bottles within 24 hours of posting a wanted ad. Thanks guys Anyway, since I'm a stable genius who definitely thinks about things like this ahead of time, I put a bulb in that spot on my cluster when I put the 125mph speedometer in. Unfortunately, the bulb I put in was blown. That means I get to take the dash apart again! There we go. Didn't even have to unplug it. The sensor is a very simple switch, and the light can be tested simply by jumping the 2-pin brown connector that you will find somewhere around the plugs for the washer pumps. My washer bottle is in very good shape for the age, so I'll be modifying it for the sensor. You'll want to remove it to clean the decades worth of crap out of it, as well as the plastic shavings you'll inevitably get inside the bottle when drilling. The bottle is in good shape, but what about under it? Yuk. Gimme a minute... That's better. As a side note, that rust on the booster might just mean its time has come. I haven't noticed any fluid loss, so if there is a leak, it's a very slow one. For all I know, it could be fluid dripping down from me clumsily filling the master cylinder when bleeding. The hole doesn't need to be very precise. As long as the sensor doesn't touch the bottom of the reservoir, you'll be fine. I drilled it approximately where it seemed to be on the genuine article. There's an angled spot on the bottom of the reservoir right above it to guide you. I used a 1-3/8" hole saw, which seemed about right and gave a snug but not too tight fit for the sensor. It's hard to tell, but the sensor has miles of clearance before it touches the bottom of the bottle in pretty much any place you could drill. As long as you're fairly close to the OEM location, you'll be fine. How about a function test? Yep, it works. Now I need to go buy some more washer fluid. Time for a complete change of pace! As some of you may know, I have an unhealthy obsession with vintage audio equipment. I also like doing weird stuff that nobody else cares to do. As the guy who is responsible for the recent crop of factory Jeep radios with auxiliary inputs, you'd think that I might have some crazy alien technology in my own truck. Nope, not at all. The radio in my truck is a customer trade-in from very early on in the business. It has no special parts (save a few fancy capacitors) and is in extremely rough shape on the inside. It has about 15 broken circuit board traces, at one point had a ridiculous number of bad solder joints, and would certainly not pass muster for actual sale. The aux cable isn't even shielded! Despite all of that, it's been in my truck since the end of 2017 and hasn't once given me any form of trouble. The tape deck also doesn't work, not that I really tried to fix it. It is correct for the '91 model year, however, and it looks great from the outside. It works, but it's a little... pedestrian. So, that leaves us at an impasse. I had a very long list of requirements: - From the AMC-Jeep family - Available in the year 1991 - Fits in my truck's dash with no modifications to the dash - Looks correct, including having the correct type of display - Doesn't have a clock - Has an available service manual - Is weird and uncommon, but doesn't give anyone who glances at it second thoughts Also, I'm running an amplifier, and I would really like to have line-level outputs from the radio itself without building a custom-designed preamp into the radio... That's one hell of a list of requirements, but I did some digging, and I came up with this: This is the head unit out of a 1988-1992 Eagle Premier. For the most part, the Premier used standard Jeep radios with slightly different lighting and no "Jeep" stencil on the face. However, the fanciest sound system option was made up of this tuner/cassette player unit, and a second equalizer/amplifier unit that was located directly below in a second DIN-sized enclosure. The Eagle Premier was quite an unremarkable car and is mostly forgotten today, to the point that I can't even find a good HD picture of one of these radios installed in the vehicle. It's packed with a lot of fancy technology for its time, including National Semiconductor's Dynamic Noise Reduction, track searching and Dolby on the cassette player, and a scanning feature for the radio tuner. It's exactly the same size as a standard radio, and any of the various mounting brackets fit on it perfectly. Here it is with an XJ bracket: The equalizer unit obviously won't fit in the dash, and it isn't strictly necessary. The unit will work, after a fashion, without it. To my complete surprise, this radio works (except for the tape player, but we'll get to that) I purposefully bought one that wasn't in extremely good shape, because as you'll soon find out, I'll be doing quite a bit of surgery on this thing. What problems am I going to face by not using the equalizer unit? Well, to start, this head unit has no ability to control volume, balance, fade, or tone by itself. It sends signals to the equalizer unit, and the equalizer unit controls those things. It plugs into the equalizer unit with this: That's not a good start, considering I need this to plug into a standard Jeep radio plug. Fortunately, I have this for some guidance: It actually shares a huge number of parts with the 1988 Jeep/Eagle cassette deck, the RX-170. Here it is with the top cover removed: There's a lot of stuff in here, and all of it will need to be restored. So, what are my plans? I'll be fully restoring this radio to the extent that I can. I'll also be upgrading it to work by itself in a Jeep without the external equalizer module. At a minimum, that means installing a Jeep wire harness connector, and giving it the ability to control volume and balance by itself. That'll involve things you normally don't see in a Jeep project thread. If at all possible, I'd like to have a working tape player at the end of it, and an auxiliary input goes without saying. This will be a project that I work on in my spare time, so it might be a while before I have a working product to see. I often wonder how long it'll be before I'm making new-production radios. With this project, we inch ever closer. I've already said too much!

If you have 12.0 volts at the battery, the battery is pretty much dead and will not start the truck. You want to see 12.4 to 12.8 volts on a charged battery.

I think we need to go back a little bit. What are you using this truck for? What are your plans?

When I bought my A/C manifold gauges (and vacuum pump and all the other tools I use for A/C work) I thought I'd only use it all once. I then discovered that I really enjoy fixing A/C and have now worn out my (cheap) manifold gauges. Also, steering column service tools. I've been getting by with cheap tools, but I bought the OTC 7927 steering column service set recently to rebuild a friend's GM steering column... that thing is amazing. Totally recommended. It makes the job so much easier when the tool just works and you don't need to fight with it. My advice for this is usually to start out with the cheap version of the tool. If you break the cheap tool, or find out that you enjoy doing the work that the cheap tool lets you do, buy the nice tool. High quality tools just make everything so much easier. Kind of like using OEM parts vs. aftermarket.

Yup. I have '96 splash shields on my '91. The '96 parts actually seem to be made a little better and last longer than the originals.

I didn't pay that much for mine, but it looks like that has everything you need and a lot you'll never use. The latest cartridge it has only goes up to '98, fine for old Jeeps though. I bought mine piecemeal over a couple of months and only got what I needed. I kind of wish I would've gotten the graphing MTG2500 because it has a screen that's easier to read. Those are rare and stupid expensive though. The diagnostic plug for the trans is under the dash by the TCU. The one for the engine is behind the ECU. I have no idea what kind of information the TCU can give you, but the ECU has some surprisingly good data for '91. I've never needed transmission data, but I might grab the chry-2 adapter for gits and shiggles to see what it's good for.

If one of the cartridges covers domestics up to '89, you just need the cartridge and the JEEP-1 adapter. You'll also need the cable that goes from the top of the scan tool to the adapter.