Little Red (T.J.'s XJ)

Got a few small things done this past weekend. I attempted to change out the non-functioning rear wiper motor with a replacement one from Advance Auto. It's a pretty straightforward process, however it's very dependent on the part you buy actually working out of the box, which as is my typical luck it did not. So I returned it and got my money back and will eventually just buy a brand new one and not a reman unit. An hour and a half of my life I'll never be able to get back, but so be it.

My other project for the day was to make interior mounts for my axe and shovel. Up until now they've always just kind of floated around whichever Jeep they were in and I was determined to make something permanent for them. I looked online for various quick clamps and they were all way too expensive for my taste, so I got thinking and decided to get creative. I ended up settling on electrical conduits as my mount of choice. Since the axe and the shovel both have round/oval handles the contours of the conduits work perfectly.

Mounting them was a breeze; I went with two conduits for the axe (because of weight and balance) and one for the shovel. All that was required was the quick drilling of three holes into the plastic trim panel for the mounting bolts to pass through, and just like that axe and shovel mounts. I went with wing nuts and lock washers on the actual clamp part of the conduit to make taking both items out a breeze, and to ensure things don't rattle themselves loose (within reason).

For a total of about $10 you can't really go wrong. I only got one photo of things and that was of the final product, shown below.



I plan on mounting my power in the coming weeks as well. I'm torn between installing it on the front passenger side of the center console (well off the floor since I know now there's a leak somewhere) or on the trim panel opposite the axe and shovel. Both places have their pros and cons, I just need to weigh them all out and go from there.

I also think I've decided to go with a handheld CB unit for the Cherokee, as I really don't feel like drilling for the antenna and also figuring out where to mount the radio itself (as there really aren't any good places). I'm planning on going with the Cobra 38 WXST with magnetic antenna, i.e. the Cobra HH Road Trip. A handheld CB fits my multi-day hiking lifestyle as the unit I'm looking at has instant weather channels, and I can run the magnetic antenna on the roof during highway drives and on the hood on the trail if I felt like it. I've recently discovered the greatness that is Amazon Prime which is what I'll be using to pull the trigger on it.

Looks good!

I mounted my CB on the passenger side of the center console, just drilled right into the plastic. Admittedly it does steal a little bit of passenger leg room.

I considered the console area, but having already experienced a radio in the YJ that I can barely hear without the use of a speaker hanging near my head I determined it's just not the right location for me. Passenger leg room isn't a huge concern, but since this is a DD I'd like to conceal the CB like I did in the YJ (which thus sacrificed ability to hear it which I'll admit was poor planning) and there's just no real place to do that in this vehicle. I considered under the steering wheel but again that presents a problem with being able to hear comms. The 38 WXST should fit right in the cup holder and it's small enough that I may even be able to rig up a 'mount' next to the steering wheel for quick access and easy listening.

How much was the wxst 38?    Seen this at Wally world.

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Cobra-HHROADTRIP-Handheld-Weather-CB-Radio/38594541?action=product_interest&action_type=title&placement_id=irs_top&strategy=SMT&visitor_id=DhQ1rxkljZFAcKgbVoQ7Bo&category=&client_guid=1c591784-0295-4f98-88c5-59b803ed5b32&customer_id_enc=&config_id=106&parent_item_id=38593583&guid=f9ae4180-9800-4807-a89e-6622af94dab7&bucket_id=irsbucketdefault&beacon_version=1.0.0&findingMethod=p13n


or http://www.walmart.com/ip/Cobra-HH38WXST-Handheld-Weather-CB-Radio/38593583

Don't know if prices are good but thought i would post it.

I paid $74 for mine after tax with free two-day shipping using Amazon Prime. And it comes directly from Cobra so no dinking around with a possibly sketchy internet vendor. Technically what I bought is called the Road Trip, but that's just a 38 WXST packaged with a magnetic antenna (and the radio has 'ROAD TRIP' written on it instead of '38 WXST'). If you half the price you found at Wal-Mart (since that's for two of them) that's pretty much spot on with what I paid so that is a real good price, as Amazon had the best price I could find on it. It will be on my doorstep sometime tomorrow so I should be able to mess with it this weekend and test how well it functions.

Got a few small things done this weekend ahead of the club run next Saturday. The Cherokee hasn't had a resonator or rear-most exhaust hanger on it since before I bought it and that obviously needed to be addressed. So we went to AutoZone and grabbed some 2.25" straight pipe, clamps, and a cheapie universal hanger, and got down to business.

There was a good chunk of straight pipe left out back to clamp to, but the previous resonator had rotted away/broken right at the welded flange of it and the pipe and needed to be addressed. It took some massaging with a blade-type screwdriver and a hammer, and then about 10 minutes with a grinder to smooth out the weld beads and remaining bits. From there things were pretty straightforward as you might imagine, and the final result turned out pretty good. Obviously this fix was nothing special but the exhaust definitely has a better tone to it, and more importantly it isn't bouncing around after every bump. I plan on putting a full exhaust on it in the future so this $20 fix was really all I was looking to do at this point.



Also got a chance to try out my new 38 WXST handheld CB. I tested out the range with the help of my father and the CB in the YJ. The range wasn't anything special; I'd estimate only about half a mile, but that's with iffy weather coming in and lots of obstacles in a suburban setting. Hopefully it will be a little bit better on the open road, and even if not the half-mile range will do just fine when wheeling. Very clear audio from it and a lot of good functions that I plan on using moving forward. For what it is and what I paid for it I'm happy with it so far.

Took care of two items of business this weekend: a failing TPS sensor which cropped up after last week's run and my non-functional windshield defroster. The TPS was plug and play, while the defrost issue was easy once I figured out the cause. And after taking my life in my hands Thanksgiving night and driving back in a snow/sleet/rain without any windshield defrost I was determined to get to the bottom of the problem.

I've had properly working heat and A/C on every function except for defrost, which would only come out strong on the window vents and produce basically nothing on the windshield vent. The first place I started looking weeks ago was the vacuum system, but having found nothing I then moved on to checking actuators. When all of the actuators checked out functional yet the system still wouldn't switch to defrost, I immediately began thinking that the defrost door itself might be the issue.

Fast forward to yesterday. I took the necessary dash panels off, removed the radio, and began getting to the bottom of what was going on. You could tell the defrost function itself was fine, because as soon as you switched the controls to defrost you could hear a door somewhere close followed by the sound of a tremendous amount of flowing air and a high whistle, except you only felt a small amount of air coming out of just the left side of the windshield vent. Driveway deduction: defrost door isn't opening fully if at all.

The defrost vent itself is easy to access and see from inside and on top of the dash, so that's where I focused my efforts. I could see the defrost actuator turning the arm for the defrost door, but again there was nothing actually happening during this process. The defrost vent was just wide enough for me to get my hand and arm down into, and doing this proved my hypothesis correct: the door was completely closed. My arm wasn't quite skinny enough to get the job of opening the door done so I enlisted the assistance of my smaller-armed girlfriend, and wouldn't you know she was able to push the door fully open and for the first time since owning the thing I had fully functional, high-speed windshield defrost.

Once the fix was established, I went about trying to figure out what exactly was going on. It seems that for whatever reason the door closes properly when you switch the settings from defrost to any setting but defrost, but the door will not re-open once you try to switch it back to defrost and must be done by hand. I'm guessing a rod is either unhooked or broken that attaches to the door and that's the root of the issue. The strange part is that the door stays open on its own once its pushed down, but as soon as you switch the setting it immediately comes back up (as it should) but will not switch back down.

Now, the proper solution for this is to tear the dash apart, replace whatever part is broken on the defrost door, and have a permanently fixed HVAC system. But because I don't have any plans to use the A/C in the winter, I have zero ambition to rip the dash part in the cold, and because defrost is so important this time of year, I'm opting to just keep the defrost permanently on. To try and ensure the door doesn't close after hitting a big bump or for any other reason, I jerry-rigged a coat hanger into the the defrost vent propped up against the defrost door that is getting the job done.

It's a total hack move but I'm so out of this world happy that I'll finally be able to see out of more than 15 percent of my windshield that I really couldn't care less. The only real downside is that the A/C compressor and clutch will be cycling non-stop all winter, but both of those have been (supposedly) recently replaced so they should hold up.

This time of year no one will blame you for temporarily rigging something up.

Hot damn you've been busy.

So it's been quiet on the Jeep front lately, but I do have a few things to report. I began to notice a heavy burnt coolant smell coming from the engine bay probably around the beginning of December, so as any reasonable person would do I began to hunt for a leak. I was unable to track anything down, but the smell was an itch I couldn't scratch so I made sure to keep an eye on levels. I was seeing small puddles of bright green fluid here and there, but I attributed those to my A/C compressor still possibly being overfilled.

I got a bit lazy following the club's 'final' run around the second week of December, and didn't really keep an eye on all the fluid levels like I normally do following an outing. Well on Christmas Eve my shitbox senses were tingling and I decided to take a peak under the hood. What I found was a completely empty overflow bottle, which of course caught my attention. Luckily the radiator was still full and I always keep an eye on the temp gauge and never had any scares there, so I filled the bottle and set out to track down the source.

By Christmas night the level in the overflow bottle had once again dropped, so I knew I had to get on this pronto. I feared a head gasket or worse (it is a junkyard motor after all), and was prepared for a nightmare scenario. After crawling around underneath the thing with my flashlight and following the trail of green, I found the source was the freeze plug closest to the front of the block. Crisis averted.

Following the discovery I had all the freeze plugs on the side of the block replaced with new metal ones (no rubber quick-fixes). All was good for the last week and a half until last night when I checked the level in the overflow bottle and it is once again down a little. After poking around a little today it seems the culprit is the upper house from the thermostat to the radiator. I could see a bit of pooling on top of the water pump itself, and some vaporized (dried white) trails of coolant on the thermostat housing, so it's again a relief that it's probably just a loose clamp.

I didn't have any sockets on me at the time that I discovered this, but tomorrow (as long as it's dry) I'll re-position and tighten the clamp (it's been changed from the factory style already) and see how things hold. My hypothesis as of now is that the clamp on the hose has actually been loose for quite some time, but because of the leaky freeze plug the pressure in the system was escaping from there and not the hose. Hopefully the worst case scenario is I have to replace the hose. I'm hoping this finally solves the mystery of my disappearing coolant, which has now spanned six months and two motors.

Aside from that saga, the only other Jeep-related stuff I've been up to is planning my budgets for the two Jeeps for 2015. It will ultimately be determined by my tax return, so everything is preliminary as of now. Originally I was going to sink money into skid plates and suspension components, but after further thought I've decided that the money I'm sinking into the Cherokee is to improve its street driving, gas mileage, and to equip it for mild off-roading (i.e. tow points and lighting) for trails like Henniker and Hooksett, and maybe the bypass trails at MaBell. I bought this to be my everyday driver and need to approach it as such  I do think the driver's side front axle bearing is cooked and thus the hub will need to be replaced, and I will address that once the weather gets warmer. Here's the list so far for the Cherokee:

-Skyjacker Hydro 7000 shocks
-Bosch 5277739 fuel injectors (four-hole vs. factory one-hole)
-Replacement steering box
-Trailer hitch
-Frame nutstrips (for hitch)
-Hella 500 driving light kit
-LED flood lights
-Rocker guards
-Rear wiper motor
-Axle and F/R driveshaft U-joints
-Timken hub assembly
-Solid front diff cover

Look into some LED driving lights. You can skip the fogs all together then. Find a light that has removable Amber covers like Andrew's rigids. After seeing his on the highway, I wish I had just gone that route.

dongalonga wrote:Look into some LED driving lights. You can skip the fogs all together then. Find a light that has removable Amber covers like Andrew's rigids. After seeing his on the highway, I wish I had just gone that route.

Actually I want the floods for my roof bar for situations like our night run a few weeks ago. The driving lights are going to be for everyday use as the factory ones do a decent job of lighting the sides of roads but light very poor down-road. The floods will most likely just be an Amazon special similar to yours.

I'm going with Hella driving lights for a few reasons. Their customer service was phenomenal a few years ago when, like an idiot, I dropped a light of the box and smashed it in my driveway. Casey at Hella's operation in South Carolina sent me a complete replacement light at zero charge when I explained to him what happened, going as far as to separate a pair they had in stock to send me the replacement (their fog lights are only sold in pairs). Add to that that Hella lights have proven to be friggin' tough as nails. My father got into a fender bender with the YJ a few days ago (some moron cut across four lanes going the same direction as him to pull into a Dunks) and the Hella light on the bumper is what took the impact. It's the same light that I thought was obliterated in my accident a few summers ago. As was the case then there is zero damage to the light/housing/bulb despite it being knocked back into the fender. As long as I need driving/fog lights Hella has my business.

Some of you may have seen my post on the NSJ Facebook page about my oil pressure sending unit, if not I'll sum things up here.

The oil pressure gauge hasn't worked right since the motor was swapped out back in September. Occasionally it wouldn't register anything on start up, and while driving it would constantly bounce from like 40 to 10 and 10 to 40 or just sit at 10 (which I knew was not correct). Apparently these things going bad is a common problem and I planned to change the sending unit when the weather turned warmer. Fast forward now to about two weekends ago.

After noticing a bit louder "normal" noise from the motor two weekends ago, I checked the oil level and discovered that I was down a quart. I had been noticing more oil on the ground leading up to this, but let's face it's a Jeep so this didn't really alarm me. I filled it back up and would make sure to keep an eye on it going forward. Well around Thursday last week I noticed a heavy burnt smell from the engine bay after it ran for a little while, so I popped the hood and checked the level again. It was down 1/4 of a quart in just four days, so now I knew I had an issue on my hands. I didn't have to look far before I noticed all the gunked and semi-fresh oil on the right side of the block near the sending unit and filter, so I knew I was looking for something in that area.

At some point it seems the unit sprung a leak and began oozing oil all over the right side of the block, starter, bellhousing, etc. So I cheaped out and went the AutoZone route and grabbed a replacement. My guess is this is not the first cheapie replacement unit the Cherokee has seen. You may be asking yourself, "Why do you say that T.J.?" Well I'm glad you asked. Here's the answer to your question.



Yes, that is the old sender split in two pieces. No it is not supposed to do that. That is the end result of my old man and I trying to get the electrical clip off the end. That sucker was on there good. It was comforting to see that my hunch of it being the sending unit was spot on. As you can see from the photo the worst part of the whole thing was trying to get the damn clip off the old unit, but once that was done the job was a piece of cake. It's nice to have a gauge that isn't constantly floating and shows that I actually have a pretty healthy motor.

So far so good, but as always I'll be keeping an eye on things for any additional developments. Tax season is upon us so I'll be putting my list of future goodies together accordingly.

Glad you got it fixed...did you end up going with a '97 or '98 sensor?

I went with the '98 because the electrical connection would only work with that year sensor. I looked at the '97 and '98 side by side at AutoZone and they are definitely different. The '98 thread in without issue and there's no play in it so for now I'm calling it good.

I plan on stopping by Lawless Jeep in Woburn at some point and speaking with the Parts Department to see if the part on the block that the sending unit threads into is interchangeable between '97s and '98s. If it is I'm going to swap it out once the weather turns warmer. I imagine that it must be, but then again I wouldn't have thought that the threads on the sending unit would be different year to year so who knows. The mysteries of Jeep.

So I'm happy to report that it's been almost three weeks since the sending unit was replaced and I am not down one drop of oil in that time. I'm also happy to report the same about my coolant level, not a drop out of place since the freeze plugs were replaced and the loose clamps were tightened. It is so ridiculously satisfying to be able to say that after more than eight months I've finally got all of the major issues taken care of (which now means I'll probably get in an accident on the way home from work today). All things considered I'd say my old man and I are doing a decent job of resurrecting mistreated and neglected Jeeps (translation: shitboxes).

I think the first 'upgrade' to be taken care of this year is going to be a replacement steering box. One of my best buddies is getting married mid-April in New Jersey and I'd like to take the Cherokee, but the steering has really gotten downright scary in terms of wandering all over the place on the highway. Luckily it doesn't have bump-steer or death wobble issues because if it did I would honestly never take it up on the highway, even just for short trips.

I'm debating whether or not to do the Durango steering box upgrade or just stick with a stock reman unit. I'm leaning towards stock because I'm really not planning on going larger than 32" tires on the Cherokee because it's mostly a street machine, and most people on JeepForum and the like recommend doing the swap if you plan on stepping up to 33"+ meats. Plus it would be much easier just to stick with stock because then I don't need a new pitman arm or to swap the drag link from the current arm to the Durango one. Much to consider, that's for sure. I'm hoping I can get this done in the next few weeks, but if not it looks like the girlfriend's Corolla will have to suffice as wedding transportation.

TJ, great news on the oil leak.
i have the durango box in my TJ and i can tell you that it went right in and it works well.
it is beefier compared to the stock box, you can compare side by side and notice the difference .
While you are there you might as well go with the durango box.

Where did you get yours Mark? I'm concerned that I might get caught trying to pull the old switcharoo if I return the stock box off the Cherokee as if it came off a Durango. And if that's the case the core charges are outrageous. I was thinking maybe junkyard but then there's a chance I might be swapping in a box that's just as sloppy as the one that's in there now.

I got it at advance.
Pay the core charge

Any problem returning the one off your TJ or did you eat the core charge?

They took it back no problem,, they don't know .
They wont say anything as long as you give them back a steering box.

Hmmm, this may be the way to go then. I guess I misinterpreted the write-ups online and thought that the pitman arms don't swap over, which as it turns out is incorrect. So you're right Mark it really is just plug and play. I assume you went with either the '98 or '99 non-snow plow package setup?

I went w/o plow pkg and i think it was for 98.

Tax returns are officially in, and as such so begins the part-buying frenzy.

First purchase is the Rough Country Dana 30 HP diff guard. I decided against going with a full-on replacement cover because I've seen on various forums that some people have issues with drag link and track bar clearance. The RC guard really eliminates any concern over that while still offering good protection, at a decent price to boot.

Next order of business will be to take measurements for new shocks, which I'll be doing this weekend for both the Cherokee and the YJ. I'll be going with Skyjacker Hydro 7000s more than likely for both vehicles, the only question at this point will be what length to go with to maximize droop. Always best to have the boots on the ground.

I'll be starting at a new job March 30, but took a week off in between leaving the old one and starting the new one and am hoping to get the Cherokee into the shop to have new axle and drive shaft u-joints installed, a new tranny mount installed, and possibly the replacement steering box, though I'm still considering making the steering box a driveway job. I'll get an opinion on the condition of the hubs too to see if they need replacing.

I'm trying to be conservative with my money regarding the Cherokee because the YJ will also be getting spoiled in the coming months with a bunch of upgrades. I'm going to try to keep my total parts budget for the two to around $2500 this year. Luckily upgrades for the YJ will be split 50/50 with my old man and because it's not my daily driver anymore there's no need to get things done fast, so we can likely avoid shop costs as a result. I don't know how realistic that budget will be, and I may end up sacrificing 'luxury' items to accomplish it, but that's all part of the fun I suppose.

Just ordered a Curt trailer hitch and a Hella 500 driving light kit. Both of those and the new diff guard should be here early next week. I'm hoping to order the new shocks and extended bump stops next week, and if they can get here by the week of 3/23 I'll do them all together in one shot.