Steering question, cross over & heims

[desertjr]

Hey fellas I currently was looking at going 1ton but want crossover. I saw a xj driving today and stopped and talked the guy, he had a homemade helmed crossover setup.

Tie rod was knuckle to knuckle, under knucnkle. then drag link to knuckle above knuckle. Said he was using 3/4" grabs 8 bolts holding it all in place. This is exactly what he has.

I've got 3.25" of lift and want something bullet proof. I use my jeep mainly as camping/expo stuff but it does see rocks from time to time. I was thinking of grabbing some 1.5" .500 for the tie rod and 1.5" .250 for the drag link. But idk the best rod ends? And also thought of grabbing grade 10.9 bolts like the steering box bolts vs just normal grade 8.
Would I run into any issues with this setup? Binding? Noises from heims?

 

[Goatman]

The drag link needs 5/8" bolts with high misalignment spacers so you can get enough joint movement out of the heims, both at the pitman arm and at the knuckle, for suspension cycling. Putting the tie rod totally below the knuckle reduces ground clearance on the tie rod, if that's an issue for you.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but I'd still just get the Currie steering. It's higher clearance because of the stock inverted Y design, the joints on the drag link are already positioned for a neutral position at ride height (so lot's of room for both up and down travel) and the components are strong, stronger joints and stronger link material. Not cheap, but worth it.

 

[desertjr]

I've currently got the currie drag link & picked up a ironman tie rod upgrade. 1.5" solid Dom. It's got tres hat are equivalent to the v8 zj tres I guess but can be machined for currie tres. Should I just upgrade to the currie tres on it and leave it? That was my original goal before lol.

 

[chris_amrein]

I ran that exact set up you have a picture of on my old daily driver. I liked it and I didn't get any noise from it. I think I ran 9/16" bolts because you'll need misalignements for the travel.

I used 1.25 x .120 chromoly for the tie rod. I've used this same size on our old Jeepspeed and never had a problem. Personaly I think .250 and .500 wall tubing sounds overkill but I don't do as much rock crawling as I do prerunner type driving. I always carried a spare tie rod too since they're fairly cheap to make. Use high quality chromoly heims on the Jeep and cheap or used heims on the spase tie rod to get you home.