Minuit

Got a question, since I know there are some more people with 97+ Jeeps and other Chrysler vehicles out there. Would there be any interest in a kit to adapt one of my radios to 1.5 DIN Chrysler openings as Pete has done here?

I dunno, it seems like you could do better for the money. For one, it's only Bluetooth 3.0 and I think one of the reviews said that it doesn't automatically shut off when it loses Bluetooth connection. Sure, you could just wire up a switch, but I'm lazy and hate extra switches. The one upside I see is that it takes 12V out of the box, but if you're set on hardwiring one, 12V-5V converters are dirt cheap if you trust your dongle to Chinese technology. Pete recently hardwired a Bluetooth receiver using one of those cheap 12v-5v converters and had good results. Those converters (and many USB car chargers in my experience) have a habit of introducing lots of noise, but there are ways of fixing that. Or you can take the easy way out like I did and not even hardwire the dongle. I just take it out after a few hours of driving and throw it on the charger. If I have the option of not adding more electrical stuff to my truck, I'll take it Those spring loaded clips are a life saver. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to realize that's what the spring action in the probe was for

Wow, those trucks look so similar. Wonder how close the serial numbers are. Other than the transmissions and one being 2wd, they would've been practically identical from new. Even the radios match. Would've thought that someone optioning up a Laredo would've gone for the tape deck...

Bluetooth, and some other stuff Jeremy's Radio Emporium - where your ancient radio is serviced with equally ancient test equipment. I've been looking for a real oscilloscope recently (to replace my very underwhelming scope-meter) and last week I scored this sweet Tektronix 2236 100MHz oscilloscope with an integrated multimeter. It was advertised much cheaper than market value as partially working - turns out the volts/div switches just needed a good cleaning. The calibration is even in the ballpark! (this is a taken directly from the speaker output of an RX-161) It's period correct too - this particular model was made from 1984 to 1989. In 1984 this scope cost $2,650 - in 2017 dollars, that's $6,300! Crazy, considering the kind of specs you can get for barely $400 these days. The integrated multimeter was a $1,000 option back then. Anyway - Bluetooth. You've all been asking about it, and I've disappointed you once so I guess I better try not to do that again. Here's the deal: A $14 Bluetooth dongle plugged into the aux jack of a basic Enhanced Radio will give you comparable results to the prototype I tested. Some of them even have microphones for phone use. The market is completely saturated with these things, and you can get them with plenty of different feature sets. So, for those of you with Bluetooth on the mind, buy with confidence. Here's the one I have in my truck: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013QJ0W8Q/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 I've had it for a few weeks now and yes - you do lose some sound quality versus an aux cable like all Bluetooth stuff, but it works.

That looks excellent. Great story too. Guess I shouldn't complain about having to drive an hour or two to pick up parts I agree with what they said above me. Keeping it away from salt is the only way to prevent it from rusting.

Seems to be working fine. Very much appreciated

That looks like a great spot to work, and looks like it's about the same size as mine too. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven the first time I worked on my truck in the garage, and not on a wavy gravel driveway. Being able to actually find all the stuff I dropped on the ground changed my life! What brand were those motor mounts and how did they fit? The ones on both of my trucks are looking a little sad.

Any truck slider will be a security risk. How much of a security risk is it considering it's attached to a 30 year old truck that you can just smash a window and get into anyway? That's up to you to decide. Breaking into a Comanche will never be a challenge for anyone. My policy is to not keep valuables in view, and not have anything visible in the truck that would be a target for a thief in the first place. Not having any experience with any of the sliders, my gut says if you can find an OEM one try to get it. The aftermarket one gets mixed reviews from what I can see.

I can neither confirm nor deny that I'm working on it, and I can neither confirm nor deny that I've built another prototype using a better radio. (I'm bogged down with some other things right now. I currently have 5 radios not including mine that need to be taken care of before any more work happens. The new prototype has some deficiencies that I want to sort out before going further. I also rebuilt the steering on my 91 last week and will be going back to Cookeville tomorrow for my final semester)

Same. I keep forgetting to look at my 89, but I don't think you need to pull the rad to get at the balancer on it either.

And here I am just wondering how Don gets his kick panels to stay put.

This is how the vast majority of car-part.com inquiries go for me. "oh, we sold that 10 years ago!"

Don't. The average WJ in the junkyard probably has around 200k miles, at which point the bushing has very little life left whether it looks bad or not. Plus you'll have to remove it in the junkyard (PITA), change the bushings (PITA) and then install in your truck (PITA) and at that point I don't see the value versus buying new control arms. Just buy new arms and only go through one PITA.

The factory leather-wrapped wheels are a bit thicker and feel nicer than the base model ones.

There are a total of five tie rod ends in the MJ's steering/suspension, so even a small amount of slop in them can make a big difference. The track bar's condition would also contribute to loose steering as well. The best thing to do would be have someone else turn the wheel while you check for any movement that shouldn't be there. No matter what you do it'll never feel like a modern rack and pinion system. That's just the nature of the beast. Another vote for stock height. And don't junk those Marchals.

Here is a sound test, conducted with a run of the mill RX-171 in my truck with my exact setup. In fact, it's a broken customer trade-in that I repaired. No external equalization or sound processing has been applied, and no editing to the video has occurred other than to splice clips together. Here's my full setup for all of you who don't read my build thread: Head unit: JRE Standard Series Enhanced Radio with nothing special done to it other than an aux input Amplifier: Alpine KTP-445U Front Speakers: Morel Tempo Ultra 502 Rear Speakers: Polk Audio DB461 Disclaimer: it sounds far, far better in person. I am playing highly compressed music straight from the browser on my laptop and recording it with the integrated mic on my six year old digital camera that wasn't exactly top of the line to begin with. Compared to what I hear, the recording is lacking in dynamics and may not even be in stereo. The audio was HEAVILY compressed yet again when I uploaded it to Youtube. All audio in this video is royalty-free music from the YouTube Audio Library. The tracks are, in order: - Spring In My Step - Silent Partner - Brown Bag - Silent Partner - Sugar Zone - Silent Partner

Just like Pete says, the radio part is done by me. I take a radio from my stock or one a customer sends to me and work it over - new bulbs, aux input, the works. In most cases you reversibly lose AM reception in the process. The auxiliary connection is at the rear of the radio to keep the original look. It works like any other aux jack, and so you can plug in any of those Bluetooth car adapters and have Bluetooth music (and some of them even support phone calls too). There are some battery powered ones out there that don't need any other connections too. Pete wanted to hardwire his though. As to mounting a setup like this in the MJ, the way I would do it would be under the center console. There's not really any room in the MJ's radio cavity, and my lower dash area is cramped with stuff already. That's how I have the aux cord set up in my own truck - in the pic you can just barely see the aux cable under the cupholder. I'm fairly sure there's enough room under the console bezel to fit the Bluetooth receiver, 5v-12v adapter, and ground loop isolator (if necessary). That's probably the way I'd do it, the only problem is you'd have to run switched 12V out to under the console. You could even get creative and use a splitter to have both an aux cord and Bluetooth!

I was going to write a sentence here about how long it's been since the last update and how little I've done, and also quoting the post where I said I'd like to be done by 2018 and laughing at it, but frankly I couldn't come up with anything that was remotely interesting to read. After an extremely exhaustive search, I found a 1991-specific underhood light! You wouldn't believe how long it took me to find one. This thing is seriously bright, and ticks off the last part of the factory "Light Group" option. The connector is already present for it in the harness, so once I found the correct light that hadn't had the connector snipped off of it, it was simply a matter of mounting the light to the hood, via two pre-punched divots. I have wanted to add a 2-way component speaker system to the truck. This is where I do it. I had grown pretty tired of the sound of my Polk Audio coaxial door speakers. In my case, they were extremely fatiguing to listen to and had way too much response in exactly the frequency ranges that hurt my ears, which as it turns out is a fairly common criticism of Polk speakers. I found out that I was looking for speakers with a "smooth" sound. This lead me to Morel speakers, which is what I bought: This is the Tempo Ultra 502 component set, one of their mid range products. If you look on Crutchfield, they sell for over $400. Don't buy them there. I imported mine from Israel at a huge discount. Shipping didn't take as long as you'd think, either. The woofers install in the normal place in the door. That's the easy part. On pretty much any vehicle, you have to get a little creative to install tweeters. The most common way to physically mount the tweeters is in a door panel or A-pillar, but as I'm sure you all know by now I'm anal about an original appearance so I want this entire install looking factory. Thankfully, Jeep thought to give us tweeter locations in the lower dash panel, which is what those little vents are. Not only do you have to mount them, you also have to be able to split the signal between the woofer and tweeter with the crossover. Basically, there's no way to do this without altering the factory wiring in some way. Hello factory tweeter connector... So long, we hardly knew ye. The factory Jensen Accusound wiring (which for some reason I added when I installed the power windows last year) shares the exact same signal between the door speakers and the tweeters. This won't do, and because of the way it's wired there's no way to get out of cutting that connector off. Removing this connector pretty much deletes the Jensen factory wiring. Why did I bother adding that anyway? Speaking of the stock setup, I wanted to be able to painlessly return to it if I ever decided to run coaxial speakers again. The way I setup the wiring is a little too complicated for me to explain at 10 PM on four hours of sleep, but I have the choice of running the old setup (just plug the connectors with green/brown wires together) or running component speakers, where the blue and white wires come in. They extend the wiring to an external crossover (the box that comes with the speakers), which splits the signal from the amplifier into high frequencies for the tweeter and midrange and low frequencies for the woofer. Of course, everything you see here was also done on the passenger side. The only difference is the wire colors. These are the factory Jensen tweeters. The tweeters themselves aren't the worst thing in the world, but any decent aftermarket set will run circles around them. That's the only time you're going to hear that phrase come out of my mouth. However, it turns out that my new Morel tweeters are almost exactly the same size as the holes in the Jensen tweeter brackets! A couple of rivets and a little bit of dremel action later, and the Morel tweeters fit perfectly in the factory brackets: The quick disconnects that came on the tweeters were a little bit too aftermarkety for me, so I snipped them off and added real connectors. I don't know why there's a Leatherman in this picture. The crossovers just barely fit on my very crowded lower dash panel with no room at all to spare. And finally, the tweeters were installed in the factory locations. Was it worth it? Hell yes it was. The Morel component speakers are so much better than the outgoing Polks it's hard to put into words. The annoying midrange peaks are almost completely gone, there's way more bass, and the high frequencies are present but not overbearing. I'll have to find some royalty free music and do a sound test, because the sound in my truck really is excellent now. And finally, it's time to address something I've been letting go for a while - namely, the fact that my tie rod ends and track bar are very old (possibly original) and are a little loose in their old age. After finding a popped grease boot on the drag link, I decided to do a complete rebuild of everything that hasn't been replaced in the steering. I didn't bother documenting the process, because replacing tie rods and track bars on a non rusty vehicle has to be the most boring thing ever. The Moog parts I used fit fine, but the grease fittings on some parts were garbage and wouldn't thread into the part. On half of the parts I had to reuse the old grease fittings, which of course most likely being 27 year old Mopar parts threaded in perfectly. Old and rotten: There's one more tie rod end, but I replaced it when I installed the "Cure" a while back. New and sexy: The shiny coating on everything is a rust preventative. Although I'm sure Moog has gone to every possible length to protect their parts from rusting (), I would like these expensive new parts to look new for as long as possible, especially considering I may very well have to drive this on salted roads. That of course meant it was time for yet another string alignment! As expected, the steering feels much more secure and much tighter. The truck also stops a little straighter now. Maybe the rotten old track bar bushing had something to do with the brake pull I can't quite pin down? Anyway, that wraps up 2017. Hopefully I'll do something interesting in 2018.

Backwards Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

Seems to me like you've got more important things to worry about than a plastic cover. Don't drive that thing until you get some decent cables on it. Whatever is screwed to the cover is a hack modification for...something. The HO system ditched that cover in favor of a fuse box.

Yes to both.

Yeah. Chances are it'll start really leaking a little while down the line. 95 and 96 were some of the highest production years of Cherokees, so hardly a rare part. It's well worth your time to find one that won't drip brake fluid on your shoes. You won't have to mess with the firewall with a 95 or 96 Cherokee booster either.

I'm still using rubber endlink bushings - agreed, that's probably taking away a lot of my improvement. I'll probably swap to poly bushings at some point.

Damn that's rusty! Interior looks like blue to me, hard to tell though.