2wd aw4 to 4wd question

Hi, first off i know what all is involved in the swap.. iv done my fair share of reading up on this. My question is when it comes to the conversion i only see two options..

Option A) pull a whole drivetrain from donor jeep and intall into project.
I wouldnt mind this but i dont have a donor jeep nor the room for it lol.

Option B) (imho..not a good option at all!) dismantle the aw4..still requires removal and swap in the main shaft from a 4wd trans to the 2wd. again why someone would elect that as an option i dont know.

My question is, would pulling the tail housing off the rear of my 2wd aw4 and taking some measurements off a 4wd aw4 (from a way earlier year) that i have and cutting down the rear output shaft to length work?

It wouldnt be too much different from a hack n tap the way i see it. i have heard of ppl mentioning this in some threads but not really talked about much. just wanted yalls two cents on this idea.

won't work AFAIK... the shaft is cut a different way, I'm fairly certain the splines don't go far enough down it to just cut the end off. I will let you know when I do my 4wd swap on my MJ as I intend to do option B and rebuild the transmission at the same time just for the experience / so I know I have a freshly rebuilt AW4 sitting around as a spare.

You can pick up a 4wd AW4 for 120 bucks or less at a junkyard or a part-out, I'd do that.

well you were right about one thing..the shafts are deff!!! cut a different way. the output from my tranny is a 27 spline and the input to my 242 is a 23..sooooooo got other problems to fix b4 that now :banghead: lol.

Did take pics of the progress tho so i will post dem up later tonight after i get this thing put back together. Least its sunny and not looking like rain atm.

That explains a lot, actually. I've been wondering if the output shaft splines on a 2wd matched the input on a 231 or the output on a 231 for a while. Seems they match the output of the 231, since that's also a 27 spline shaft.

Yep... I'd swap trannies or gut and rebuild yours with 4wd components if you really feel like a project.

It's really not that bad, I did a full drivetrain pull and reinstall in a single evening two weekends ago, working alone. I actually didn't get it running till the next weekend because I took the whole week worth of evenings randomly working on it to get everything reattached to the motor, but had I started at around noon Sunday instead of around 5pm Sunday I could have had the whole thing together again and running the same day. It's up to you whether you pull the whole drivetrain or lower the tranny out from under the rig and swap with the motor in place still, I just prefer pulling the whole thing.

The 231 and 242 came in both 21 and 23 spline input shaft sizes. Depends on the trans it was bolted to. The 4dw AW-4 also came in 21 and 23 spline output.
With the easy availability of the 4wd AW-4 -vs- the cost of the conversion parts, I'd just get a JY AW-4 and have it re-built.
If you decide to do the conversion instead, you still need to get it torn down, so you might as well get a rebuild while it's apart. You can try to find the output shaft/tail shaft housing used, but in my experience, junk yards are reluctant to tear apart transmissions to sell internal components.

I've actually got a pair of fubar aw4s I'm tearing down for exactly that right now. I'm using the 4wd parts from one but the other set is unclaimed, I have them listed for free. Only issue is you would need a full set of gaskets to put it back together, and at that point you may as well do the frictions too and call it a rebuild.

kastein said:

...,Only issue is you would need a full set of gaskets to put it back together, and at that point you may as well do the frictions too and call it a rebuild.

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Exactly.

to edit my earlier comment,

The 231 and 242 came in both 21 and 23 spline input shaft sizes. Depends on the trans it was bolted to.

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I was unclear, I meant to say it depends what YEAR transmission it was bolted to. the AW-4 came in both 21-and 23 spline(depending on year)

tbburg said:

the AW-4 came in both 21-and 23 spline(depending on year)

Click to expand...

agreed.
I read somewhere online that it was possible to cut the shaft down for a 2wd to 4wd convertion....what i found out from some local jeep friends is thats really only possible for some manual trannys.

Well having been informed this i went out today and found a jy south of me that had about 8 or 12 4wd aw4s from 99-01 xj's for $40 a pop....so i bouth two. lol! at that price it cant hurt to have an extra on hand, am i right?

and the good-er news is that my 242 slides right on so now its just a matter of getting transmissions swaped out.

kastein, do post up some pics of your progress on that tear down if you can. Im thinking really hard on rebuilding one of these transmissions i have here now to throw in later down the road.

Option B) (imho..not a good option at all!) dismantle the aw4..still requires removal and swap in the main shaft from a 4wd trans to the 2wd. again why someone would elect that as an option i dont know.
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Well, If you got a good 2WD SLUSH-O-MATIC sitting around and a blowen 4WD in you Jeep one might to the work. But if your not a tranny man I won't take the job on alone. Not the first one anyway.