Yes, grats! I don't understand the regional bit. Region of schooling newbs?

And the story continues, Last night i was going to drive the jeep to my buddies to work on it with him at his house. So I'm leave my house start down the highway and all of a sudden the jeep shudders and dies. now it is 12:30 AM and I am on the side of the highway. I look under the jeep and see a bundle of wires hanging from the jeep. The rear o2 sensor wires swung down and got bought in the drive shaft and broke off from the body. the sensor was fine but the wiring was not. It also blew the fuse. I don't keep any mini fuses in the XJ only in my WJ so i was stuck. I call AAA for a tow to my buddies house. in the mean time a State trooper pulls behind me and tells me I am in a dangerous spot and he is going to push me off the highway and to a safe spot. So a call goes out for a tow and I'm waiting for a long time. at 3:00 AM a truck finally comes but his soul purpose is to tow me to the nearest gas station to get me off the road. I tell him to just tow me home because he says the truck to take me to my buddies won't be there until 5 AM. SO i get home grab a few hours sleep and my buddy comes to my house in the morning. We fix the wiring clear the codes and start it up. ok everything works. So we start to diagnose the rough run. Swap out the IAC, no change, swap the TPS, no change, once again check over wires, all in order, check dizzy and cap and rotor, all fine. Next we decide to check all the plugs. i start from the back and work forward allowing the hoses up front by cylinder 1 to cool before i go sticking my had in them. 6,5,4,3,2 all fine and clean and gapped. pull out #1!!!!!!!!! :brickwall: it is black and sweet with the smell of gasoline. now we try to diagnose. I check the resistance of the plug wire and it is fine, i ohm test the (brand new) injector, it checks out. so we run it again to watch it. as before the engine is doing a little dance but not misfiring notably. put a hand to the exhaust and its puffing evenly, no white smoke, no black smoke. as a test i swap in a &@$# spark plug to see if it makes a difference and no it doesn't still covered in gas. I am not sure how to proceed. I don't have a timing light to check timing. should i remove the injector and check it? should i remove the plug and check it for spark? I don't know how else to test.

Bummer! Sheez. Glad you got out of it OK anyway. Yea, myself I'd want to check spark on #1. I might look inside the dist. cap just on GP. Wet? Dirty? sounds like your spark is finding another rout. One thought is to pull the fuel pump relay or otherwise disable the pump till it dies, then pull #1 plug, ground the body and crank it and look for spark. I might also put my finger on the hole and feel for compression...now and then there is none. It's black ? I wonder if that injector is "hosing". You might rap it with a screwdriver handle...also last week I discovered that a bulb out of a 3 cell mag light hooked straight to my injector plug flashes....

In this link is where I tried the light. I guess a dash bulb should work...maybe in three tries somehow I never got it connected right...

https://www.cherokeeforum.com/f2/cro...142361/index3/

I will pull the plug and check for spark. I want a bright blue spark right? Something tells me I getting either a weak spark or none at all. By "hosing" you mean that the injector is either sticking open or delivering too much gas right?

Yea, guess it happens. Being black and wet might be what you would get there, carboned up and flooded. You might also see that with much worse things we don't want to mention yet...

Anyway yea, that's basic. See that there is a nice crisp blue spark.

I tested the spark and I got a sucky spark. It was dull blue on the electrode end but orange the rest of the spark. Now I don't know too much about spark diagnostic but I'm guessing it's a weak spark. Tested injector plug and it was find I used he may light bulb. I tested the injector and it clicked nicely. I'm going to swap injectors 1 and 2 to see if cylinder 2 gets gassy like cylinder 1 did. And I'm getting a new rotor. Just cuz I'm curious, those much worse things, are they a slipped compression ring, or a bad valve? I know I'm not burning oil because there's no smoke in the exhaust.

??? which bulb?

I'm at a loss, don't really know what to think. I might check spark right from the coil. Also of course there is the cap as well as the rotor. You could swap wires also.

Hopefully someone more familiar with your 96 will chime in here. I'm thinking a compression test is never a bad idea just to get a look where your engine is, and you might find your problem as well.

Spell check and I don't get a long well. it should have said "mag light". Yea I'm getting that feeling also. I have done almost every test save for the few I will do Friday, and am coming up with very little. No CEL and just cylinder one is what is stumping me the most. I would expect this out of a beat up engine but not a brand new one.

??? Maybe your eyes are as sharp as mine once where....with only 35 thousants there in that gap seeing that one side is blue, and another isn't....I'll take your word for it. I'm gonna guess that if you are seeing blue, that is not your miss. Maybe it could be better, but it should fire. You might come back to that, but I'm still curious about the compression. Since it had happened to me a few times, it must be every other posters problem, right? :rofl:. Just kidding! (but it's not so funny). What I mean is if the piston/rings, or a valve took a real crap, you might find a wet, black plug as well. I've just put my finger on the hole and cranked it to "get the news". If you are getting fire there, and fuel, seems, the checking compression is not a bad idea. Hopefully you are fine and I just don't have the sense to recognize a bad cam sensor or something simple like that.

ME:1 XJ:0!
 

With this many things have gone wrong with my XJ i never rule anything out. I was going to do a compression test tomorrow but I defeated the evil beast today. My weekend did not lend it self very much to working on the XJ so i didn't get to it till later in the day today. I was going to swap injectors 1 and 2 to see if injector one was the problem. I took the rail off and looked at my injectors. Now when i ordered my new injectors i got all 6 but half were a slightly different style. 3 of them had this yellow plastic tip over the end that retained the O ring and 3 had a simple collar to retain the O ring. The 3 with these yellow caps had a hole in the cap for the injector opening. On injector one this yellow cap had some how deformed a little and was messing up the injector spray pattern. So I removed the yellow piece and under it it looks exactly the same as the other injectors. So i fixed the opening in the cap. Put he rail back in hooked everything back up. I was only half sure that this would work so i got in put in the key turned it and..... Hey presto it runs perfect. I was so sure that I was going to have to run a compression test and possibly have to re ring cylinder 1.

Well great..but what? A cap? Is it plastic? You sure that wasn't just to protect it for shipping?

I'm sure. I thought the same thing but to be sure I called the manufacturer and they said it is not meant to be removed and that they were 2 slightly different styles. I know it is a bit sketchy but that's what they said.

Well then. Yea! See how it goes. Glad you got'r...keep us posted.:thumbup:

The jeep is pretty happy. I have a few exhaust leaks here an there. At some point I am going to need a whole new exhaust not including the manifold. I have patched the holes best I can. It will be fine for a little while. Now I have a wobble or shake in the front end when it's in 2x4 but not in full time. Same with a clunk in the front end when turning. I took it out in the highway yesterday and around, I think, 50-55 (speedo doesn't work quite rite since the incident that ripped out the o2 wiring, on the todo for today), the front end started to shimmy. I backed off the pedal before it went into full on, threaten to flip me over, shake. I looked under the jeep and saw the bushings for the upper control arms are heavily dried and cracked. Could that be the cause? Also I'm curious, what kind of life can I expect out if the reman? I'm assuming that if I treat it right I should get just as many miles as if it was a brand new block.