Back in an XJ: Building a mild 1998 Sport

Well admittedly the XJ does a lot of sitting next to the garage, so it was nice to take it out yesterday for a little light wheeling. A buddy of mine recently purchased a 100 series Land Cruiser with a 2" lift and slightly larger tires. He wanted to take it up so we ran up to Bunce School Road, Iron Clads, and Rock Creek. We tried to hit Johnny Park road but the gate was closed. I've been on it this time of the year before so figured it was worth trying before we headed home.

Overall it was a good day and decent bit of fun. The snow got respectably deep on Rock Creek with a thick later of ice underneath. This lead to a lot of full throttle runs into the snow to break trail ahead of the Land Cruiser. All was going decently well until about 1/2 way up when suddenly my air compressor kicked on and I could see I was still losing air pressure on the gauge. Sure enough once I rolled down the window I could hear an air leak. I crawled underneath and found that the air was rushing out of the breather hose for the front diff. I'm guessing I had an o-ring failure on the collar for the Zip Locker but I haven't opened it up yet to see.

Dude, those are some flores quality photos...

(I’m just jealous you actually got out in the woods)

Yeah, I just never seem to take any and the sun was in the wrong spot when my g/f was taking them of us going down that little ledge on Iron Clads.

Nice rig! I had more fun in my Cherokee on 35's then anything I have built since.

fireLt. said:

Nice rig! I had more fun in my Cherokee on 35's then anything I have built since.

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Holy back from the dead. How have you been Kevin?

I agree, IMO an XJ is about perfect on 35's with around a 4.5" lift. I kind of wish I'd kept the 2000 XJ instead of going all JK, but oh well. Live and learn as they say. I'm still planning on building a buggy after the summer but will keep the XJ for trips like this and as a back up driver.

Things are really good for me these days. Got married to a great woman 2 years ago and business is doing great. Rockin a JK these days but miss my old Cherokee. We mostly adventure wheel instead of anything too crazy in the rocks. I do drop in here from time to time to see what everyone is up to.

fireLt. said:

Things are really good for me these days. Got married to a great woman 2 years ago and business is doing great. Rockin a JK these days but miss my old Cherokee. We mostly adventure wheel instead of anything too crazy in the rocks. I do drop in here from time to time to see what everyone is up to.

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Congrats, I'm glad to hear things are going good.

During my last trip the Zip Locker started leaking air real bad. Last weekend I decided to tear the XJ apart to investigate what was happening.



What I found was that one of the O-rings for the air coupler on the carrier had spit out. When I first assembled everything I had to run a fair amount of shims on that side of the carrier to get the back lash correct. It put the outer o-ring on the very edge of the carrier but leak tested good so I ran it.

You can see in the pic of the carrier how the air seal housing is barely on there. The slot is actually where the o-ring goes.



I called Yukon and talked to them. They said it was ok to put shims on the outside of the air seal housing too as needed to keep the seals fully engaged when setting the back lash and pre-load. Of course none of this was mentioned in the instructions, but live and learn. I ordered up some another shim set and new O-rings so that I could put it back together. I also found that my ball joints on the passenger side had some play in them so I ordered a full set of Synergy ones to replace the OE ones still in this axle.

With the Yukon parts already here and the ball joints scheduled to arrive today I decided to pull the axle while the weather was nice. I left the Jeep on the side of the garage so I can keep the bikes in the garage with the snow coming tomorrow. I also took the opportunity to get Colin (my 9 year old son) dirty and teach him a few things about how it all works (ok, its a tight space and I didn't want to squeeze my fat ass in between the Jeep and the garage/fence ). He did great and worked the impact for me on all the fasteners, plus removing a lot of the smaller ones himself once I broke them loose.







Hover mode engaged



Patient prepped for surgery



I'm also going to go ahead and gusset the inner C's while I've got it out. I'll probably make my own but of course the Artec ones are pretty cheap so I might just go the lazy route and order those instead.

Is your Trac bar bracket stock? How do you like the axle with the added strength so far, will you beef up shafts and yokes as well? :cheers:

Yes, its the stock TB bracket on both the axle and frame side. I don't notice the truss as far as performance goes, its just a piece of mind thing. I've ran D30's with 35's before and not had issues. On my last XJ with a Spartan locker and 35" Krawlers I only broke one stock shaft and that was going backwards up Big Momma Hill at Left Hand when it was muddy. I do carry spare shafts for both axles in the back of the jeep just in case. The fronts are so easy to replace on the trail its almost not worth the money IMO to upgrade them. Besides, I'd rather know my weak link is the shaft then have to start worrying about the ring and pinion. Those would be a lot harder to replace on the trail, and without selectable hubs could make the Jeep very hard to get off the trail.

Waiting for more parts now as I snapped the copper tube out of the air seal housing. Just what I wanted to have happen. Since I'm waiting on that anyways I also went ahead and ordered the Artec C gussets. Some people eat their emotions, I buy parts. LOL

Installed the Inner C gussets this morning. After lunch I'm going to try to motivate myself to put the Zip Locker back together. We had a really busy weekend with lots of family activities and I just want to be lazy, but the G/F left me with an empty house and no chores as a reward so I should probably make good use of it.

I tried to watch the newest Pirates of the Caribbean on Netflix but decided it was more entertaining to do some laundry and work on the axle. I cut off the sway bar mounts as the passenger side one was rubbing on my steering a bit. I also got the zip locker back in with the new parts. It leak tested good and now the air seal housing is in a much better spot on the carrier. I also decided to use a lube locker on the cover this time. I've never used one before so we'll see how it goes. Lastly I sprayed some paint on the freshly welded bits. I still need to replace the ball joints and I think I'm going to do some double sheer mounts for the steering too.

Not for the life of me I can't remember...did the Dana 30 c's have much of an issue? Wondering if I should add those to my to do list.

I've personally never had an issue. I have seen where people have bent them, though I think it was caused more by a ball joint failure. I just figure since I had the axle out again anyways, the $70 was cheap insurance. If I wasn't also replacing worn ball joints though I wouldn't have bothered. My last XJ had the same axle combo and a similar wheel/tire combo and did just fine without these or a truss. I also had a buddy run 37" Krawlers on his D30 and other than a tendency to pop front u-joints it held up just fine. That said I'm planning to keep these axles around for a while so a little peace of mind is worth the money and time welding all this stuff on.

I bent my d30 at the cs jumping.

Out of curiosity I did some checking/measuring on the axle. The main axle tube is straight along the bottom according to my straight edge and with it level (zero degrees on my angle finder) the unit bearing mounting surfaces on the knuckles are at 90 degrees. So it seems that my axle is currently straight. I didn't do any pre-loading before welding the truss on either.

I'm always weary of any axle deflection occurring. It doesn't take much to make things a headache.

I'm the type that will weld a 1" section at opposite ends (after it's all in place), and then wait for it fully cool before adding another weld. It might take a full day for the truss to be welded in place, but I have pretty good guarantee of nothing warping. It's my plan for both the D30 and 8.8 Artec trusses I'm going to be putting on for the blue XJ. I can do plenty of other things while it cools I figure.

Since I'm also going to be doing Artec coil buckets (with modifications), LCA mounts (mounted even with the tube, hence coil bucket mods), as well as custom OTA track bar brackety and swaybar mounts...there will be a lot of welding going on :laugh:

I went fairly slow when welding the truss on. I took measurements before and after welding to make sure nothing had moved either. The only part that I welded all at once was the cast housing. Lots of pre and post heat, then wrapped it in a welding blanket and a movers blanket to help slow down the cooling time.

DutchVDub said:

Waiting for more parts now as I snapped the copper tube out of the air seal housing. Just what I wanted to have happen. Since I'm waiting on that anyways I also went ahead and ordered the Artec C gussets. Some people eat their emotions, I buy parts. LOL

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I also snapped off the copper line doing my zip locker... I was able to solder it back in using plumbers flux/ solder. The first try I got solder in the line plugging it up. So I did it again but while I was soldering it I was blowing into the copper line.... did the trick!