1993 Cherokee 4.0 Engine Advice

Looking at what attention my 93 cherokee may need to survive another year of DD abuse/weekend wheeler. I drive all over, 3 hours to school from home, 4 hours to visit GF, and trips to beach and mountains every other weekend. So this jeep sees a lot of highway. Transmission was recently serviced and has a large cooler on it. Entire cooling system was replaced last summer and the engine internals has remained untouched at just around 170,000 miles. Still runs like a champ and never ever thrown up any codes or nothing. Obviously it has developed noise over time and I can hear ticks and just the loud low sounding knock. I was planning on replacing the valve cover gasket since it looks like it is starting get really wet with oil. If l go through the process of replacing the valve cover gasket should I take the time to go any deeper into the engine? I took a video and have tried to captured some noise. Does this engine need any attention or should I just keep on trucking?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FmxS11CRse8


Nick

It's hard to tell from a microphone, but it sounds pretty normal to me. Maybe a little piston slap, which is normal for 4.0's, especially, it seems, mid-90's. My 87 was quiet, and so is the 99, but my 95 and my stepson's 93 slapped pretty conspicuously. The 95, when I got it at 110 thousand miles, sounded as if it had a couple of loose marbles in it. It sounded just the same at 263 thousand miles.

If oil pressure is good, and if there is no increase of knock under load, then I would not go deeper into the engine.

Do keep an eye on the water pump (if that wasn't part of your entire cooling system replacement. It can rattle when it wears out at just about the same frequency as the piston slap, so it can go unnoticed for a while. The impeller can knock and rub on the housing for quite a while before it gets bad enough to start leaking.

I wouldn't worry bout the noise my ols 93 had it when I got it ar 193k swapped the motor into another jeep and ran mint till I sold it wicch it had over 203k then just do the gasket and keep up on oil changes with a good filter and you'll b fine

Matthew Currie said:

Do keep an eye on the water pump (if that wasn't part of your entire cooling system replacement. It can rattle when it wears out at just about the same frequency as the piston slap, so it can go unnoticed for a while. The impeller can knock and rub on the housing for quite a while before it gets bad enough to start leaking.

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The water pump was the reason I redid the the entire cooling system so that is covered. I have been reading of people doing kerosine engine flushes? Any of you guys ever had any negative effects from doing an engine flush with kerosine?

themauler said:

The water pump was the reason I redid the the entire cooling system so that is covered. I have been reading of people doing kerosine engine flushes? Any of you guys ever had any negative effects from doing an engine flush with kerosine?

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I've heard the whole spectrum from "magic" to "oh what a fool I was." Take your pick, but I think if your engine isn't all goobed up, or suffering from obvious things like stuck rings or noisy lifters, you'll do best by just getting the best oil filter you can, using the best oil you can afford, and change it a bit early once.