• NAXJA is having its 18th annual March Membership Drive!!!
    Everyone who joins or renews during March will be entered into a drawing!
    More Information - Join/Renew
  • Welcome to the new NAXJA Forum! If your password does not work, please use "Forgot your password?" link on the log-in page. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected] if we can provide any assistance.

1991 MJ build thoughts: 2wd->4wd, lift?

Threw a new to me d30 (has been owned by billyjp2, his GF Maegen, sheepjeep, and at least one other NAXJA member so far...) under it after replacing the ruined carrier and carrier bearings. Did a redneck setup job on it because I had no setup tools, wheeling to do a day later, and it was a free axle with 3.55s. Slapped a pair of alloy shafts (also on their third or fourth owner) in it. Rebuilt the transfer case after letting it leak out all the fluid through a broken RTV seam and burning up the shift forks. Continued to beat the hell out of it.

Sunday (click for big) making crappy d30s and bald allterrains do things they shouldn't:


People get mad because I am beating up and not fixing a 91 4.0 HO MJ, but others were telling me to scrap it two years ago. Can't please everyone. One of these years I may fix it and then beat it up more but for now it's a beater wheeling/work truck...
 
Last edited:
Oh right, I forgot some other stuff.

Made a ghetto A-frame gin pole for it, it'll lift 500lbs with ease and up to around 1000 before things start getting sketchy. Not safe for public roads obviously. Has made several engine swaps and part-outs very easy.
Abfxf.jpg


Canceled the V8 plans because I was dumb, sold the doubler because I needed money, bought/traded stuff for a d300, sold the 8 lug 44, bought a kingpin 60 for the front, bought a fullfloat disc brake e350 d60-1su for the rear, left the metal for the frame sitting in a stack.

Stuffed my winch in the front bumper and finally painted it, a year after building it:




Clearanced the steering box a smidge with a flap wheel and the freespool clutch knob with a grinder so I could clock it up as far as possible because I'd rather not bash it on rocks:


Still need to do a bunch of stuff, including make a skid for those winch terminals, horse trade or junkyard scavenge a rear locker, booger weld in a few repairs on my existing frame to hold me over for a while longer, buy more metal for the replacement frame, and my inspection sticker is coming due again in like 2 months :shiver:
 
I don't recall if I was on the limiter but probably was... I mostly was focusing on steering :roflmao:

That one took second gear and a good solid 30-40 foot run at the bottom of the hill (tried slower, tried less of a run at it, didn't work), I was sure I was gonna put a ujoint cap into low earth orbit. Pretty sure the alloys and aussie are the best thing I've put in that front diff yet.
 
is your rear 60 a 30 or 32 spline?

and hell I can look at kens face and hear a rev limiter. and taste brake cleen fried bacon.
 
is your rear 60 a 30 or 32 spline?

and hell I can look at kens face and hear a rev limiter. and taste brake cleen fried bacon.
add powdercoating to taste

It's out of a whatever-year E350 van with a fullfloat D60-1SU, uses D70 shafts and outers iirc, I have the BOM number around here somewhere. I *think* it's 32 spline but not sure.

If it ends up being 30 spline I may be interested in your locker at some point if you haven't sold it already by then :eyes:
 
add powdercoating to taste

It's out of a whatever-year E350 van with a fullfloat D60-1SU, uses D70 shafts and outers iirc, I have the BOM number around here somewhere. I *think* it's 32 spline but not sure.

If it ends up being 30 spline I may be interested in your locker at some point if you haven't sold it already by then :eyes:

it will never sell. if its 30 spline its yours ken.
 
hell I can look at kens face and hear a rev limiter. and taste brake cleen fried bacon.
I pissed myself when I read this:roflmao:
 
it will never sell. if its 30 spline its yours ken.
I have never been happy to be wrong before, but I counted today and it's a 30 spline. I thought they were all 32. Are there any parts you actually need? I am not gonna just take it for free, that's ridiculous, if you find or remember something you need let me know.
 
I have never been happy to be wrong before, but I counted today and it's a 30 spline. I thought they were all 32. Are there any parts you actually need? I am not gonna just take it for free, that's ridiculous, if you find or remember something you need let me know.

I need you to eat moar brake kleen!

but really its just wearing a hole in my carpet in my room. so what ever you want to give me is fine. no one else wants it.
 
FIVE-YEAR BUMP

WELL

This pile is now my longest-lived vehicle.

It's been unregistered since 2013 but I reregistered it last week and ran the NY Adirondacks Gambler 500 with it last weekend. 250 mile drive up, 250ish miles on dirt including some mild wheeling trails (was only able to run one day due to work schedule) then 250 miles back down. The only repairs I bothered to do were putting a new TPS on (old one was dead due to sitting for 5 years, 3 of them with no hood), new battery, new winch solenoid, and swapping another set of tires on.

It's really really rotten at this point, even worse than it was when TekkaMaki warned me about it 9 years ago. I don't know how or why the frame didn't break under the bed last weekend.

Sadly it's a lot closer to the end of the road than it is to the start. It's simply not worth fixing this thing up. The floors are almost completely gone, there are six huge holes in the frame including ones that have stress cracks off the sides, it breaks windshields within days or weeks, the driver door is falling off, the bed is tattered and beat, the cab is so beat up and rotten and floppy that the non movable rear cab windows slowly inch their way toward the middle...

But I own two other MJs so one of them will get all the good parts off it eventually.

Right before leaving... that's about as clean as it gets.


The crew I was running with. Ran most of the day at high speed on regular dirt roads with the '65 Bel Aire, then finished the day by doing all the four-wheeling trails w/ the YJ.


Door is literally falling off. I'd weld it back on but there's no point. It doesn't matter.


Rest of the album: https://imgur.com/a/JIEBMSl


sadly no one caught the fun part of the trails, just the silly water crossing. Hopefully my dashcam has something interesting on it.
 
Last edited:
I'll take it and give it a nice, rust-free home in Colorado. :D

If you ever watched Graveyard Cars on Velocity and saw the stuff Mark Worman and his guys can do to old Mopars, you'd understand it isn't a basket-case. All it takes to fix anything up is time and money. Not like there's too many MJ's around anyways...

After losing my XJ and getting a replacement truck (free 2000 Dakota club cab 4X4, 4.7 with a 5-speed. Don't ask how I got it for free, long story.) I've kinda been thinking about getting an MJ. I like the XJ's, but having a bed to throw random crap into is nice too. Don't really need the extended cab and that 4.7 V8 is thirsty, complicated, overkill for what I need the truck to do.

Actually saw a white MJ like that a couple years ago at the 75th Anniversary Jeepfest in Toledo. The guy had got (I think) a '98 or '99 XJ out of the yard and had swapped the engine, transmission, wiring, and even the interior into this super-clean MJ. When I ask him how difficult the swap was, he said they had to drill a couple of holes for some interior bracket, but other than that everything swapped right in lol.
 
Waste of time. It's rusty and also beat. You'd have hundreds of hours into fixing it when you could just buy a clean straight one locally for a couple hundred bucks with a bad drivetrain and combine it with a wrecked XJ.

Even the local NAXJA guys thought I was nuts for wasting my time on this junker... In 2010. Before it was anywhere near this rusty.

It will live on as parts for my other two MJs but I have zero conscience issues with cutting the unibody and bed up for scrap. It's dead, Jim.
 
Yeah... you obviously haven't scoped out prices on old Jeeps in Colorado lately.

Hindsight being 20/20, I stole my running, driving '96 XJ 4.0, AX-15, 4X4 (granted with high mileage and work that needed to be done.) a couple years back for $1,000. F***ers out here will ask $800 for a crappy ZJ with a blown drivetrain.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that my current PITA ride came equipped with the lightweight performance package that was only offered in the Midwest and New England? Seriously, there's a hole rusted right through the front bumper big enough to put both my fists through...
 
Yeah... you obviously haven't scoped out prices on old Jeeps in Colorado lately.

Hindsight being 20/20, I stole my running, driving '96 XJ 4.0, AX-15, 4X4 (granted with high mileage and work that needed to be done.) a couple years back for $1,000. F***ers out here will ask $800 for a crappy ZJ with a blown drivetrain.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that my current PITA ride came equipped with the lightweight performance package that was only offered in the Midwest and New England? Seriously, there's a hole rusted right through the front bumper big enough to put both my fists through...

Deres gold in dem Heeps!!! Seriously though, arm and a frickin leg for some of these clunkers. Then the ones people think are "built" with a craptastic lift and 33's they want 10k for.
 
Deres gold in dem Heeps!!! Seriously though, arm and a frickin leg for some of these clunkers. Then the ones people think are "built" with a craptastic lift and 33's they want 10k for.

:roflmao:

Must all be hidden in the badges. Flip side of the Jeep getting totalled was I landed a job at a salvage yard that specialized in Jeeps. (Another long story.) Never did find any gold nuggets in the bottom of oil pans or diamonds in diff housings. And I know there's not significant amounts of platinum in the cats since I only got $25 at the scrap metal yard for mine...
 
Back
Top