D44 with ABS

I'm thinking down the road here...but at some point I'll do a mild build on the XJ. It's a DD right now, so it's staying stock. Anyway, I like the ABS in the winter, so I'd like to keep it. Does anyone have a picture of the tone ring setup on the 35? It seems to me that one could just get the tone ring machined to fit the 44 shaft, weld on a boss for the sensor, and hook it all up. Anyone tried it?

here is a pic of the D35 backing plate and shaft with tone ring and sensor that I took:

click for full size:



i actualy just threw away a complete d35 housing with sensors...

Cool, that looks very do-able. Guess just a lil heads up for those who don't want to swap because they don't want to lose ABS.

Just to let you know, I was going to do this on my D35 to 29-spline 8.25 and disc brake swap, got all the parts, and gave up, dealing with swapping over the ABS, tone rings, etc, was just too damn much work....but on another note, I have a set of D35 shafts with ABS tone rings, ABS rear sensors from my '01 XJ, and a bunch of other miscellaneous brake parts if you need them!

edit: re-read that,...didn't give up on the axle or brake swap, I have an 8.25 with discs now, but I gave up on making ABS work, just pulled the fuses and relay to shut off the ABS light...the ABS system in cherokees kinda sucks anyway, mine never worked well.

I did this on my D44. Here's a thread you may want to read with a little info about it (and an old post of my explaining how to do it)
http://www.naxja.org/forum/showthread.php?t=36770&highlight=D44+ABS
I wouldn't say it's really hard, but there's a good deal of tedious work for it.

Here's a link to page of mine... I started to create a write-up for it and never really finished. It's got some pictures and a little bit of a description of how to do to. http://www.rit.edu/~bjr7178/images/dana44/
(No wise-cracks on my lousy web page or the color of my D44!)

It's a bit of work, but there's really only two components, the tone ring and sender. I brought my tone rings and shafts to a machine shop and they machined em to fit. I believe the ID was 2". They had to lightly create a machined surface on the shaft to mount the tone ring.

I used Crown Vic disk brakes and that of course changed things a little bit. There is not a lot of space behind disks (due to the e-brake "drum") but with a lot of careful work it can be done. I think I mentioned it in the other thread, but I think ZJ disks might be easier to fit ABS into since they've got a similar ABS setup already. CVs have a different style sender.

I didn't even think of ZJ's. How do the AL 44 shafts compare to XJ 44 shafts? If you took the shafts disks, and sensors out of a ZJ and threw them in an XJ housing...bingo. Thoughts?

I've never actually worked on a ZJ D44, but I considered this when I first did it. I believe they are a c-clip axle. Maybe someone else can chime in and confirm this.

You might be able to get pretty close with ZJ brakes and senders with the XJ shafts and tone rings, but you need to make sure the tone rings and senders get lined up correctly. I do not think the location I mounted my tone rings would line up perfectly, but it might have been close enough.