Chevy later when with a vacuum actuator to engaged the front drive so you didn't need to engage manual hubs.

 

Not sure what years you are referring to but our 1991 square-body Suburban had some sort of mechanical automatic hubs (sort of like a starter bendix). They were a pain in the @$$ and would not always engage so I bought a pair of Warn hubs. Since we now live way back in the hills and only use the 'Burban occasionally, I just mostly leave them locked in all the time. Keeps the front end lubricated and doesn't hurt anything except maybe gas mileage on the highway.

The next generation Suburban (1992+ which are IFS) used an electric/hydraulic CAD actuator which were prone to various failures. My K1500 pickup had one and it didn't work, so I ended up locking it in "permanently" with a short piece of 3/4" PVC pipe jammed on the end of the actuator (removed the fuse just in case the actuator decided to resurrect). This solution is analogous to the "CAD delete" suggested by Cruiser54. I never could see how spinning the spider gears in the front differential was supposed to save anything ????

Back on topic: my XJ has the 242 and I absolutely LOVE it! We just leave it in Full Time year round except for "extremely" difficult situations, like very deep snow or steep hills where mostly I'm just trying to take a load off the transmission. The FT with just highway tires has just taken us right through snow and mud which we have one or the other most of the year where we live. Sometimes it is a bit tricky to shift but I think that's mostly because we rarely move it from the FT position.

Interestingly, I bought new tires a couple months back, and a few days later I was having a hell of a time just trying to get up my driveway. I was really cussing the new tires and kicking myself for not buying snow tires instead, before I discovered that the tire shop guy had taken it upon himself to shift our Jeep back into 2wd !!!!

 

That's hilarious!!

 

I really don't get the point of a 2WD option on a 4x4 vehicle. You don't save any fuel. Maybe you wear the front tyres a bit more but if you rotate them it'll come out even. On the flipside, being able to pull out from side roads at full throttle never gets old.

 

Just curious ... which part ???

 

That you were so used to fulltime 4wd, got new tires, and the traction was worse......

 

Yeah, I was mad at first - first about the tires, then about the shop guy changing it, and then it started being pretty funny

I was mystified that it took four or five days for me to notice, but it was a pretty cold morning: about 0*F. I think the drag of the cold gear oil in the front axle was what made it so that I couldn't make it up the drive in 2wd. It gets fairly steep the last 100 feet up to the garage, and we had just been over to the barn to feed the horses (about 1/2 mile round trip).

It's going on four years since we got the Cherokee, and I am just really really impressed with its traction capabilities - and that is compared to about 45 years of experience with other 4WDs.