Joshua White

Yes sir! I've been spraying them every few days for a couple weeks, just got the rear springs in today! The passenger side "frame-side" mount gave me the most trouble but all in all I got it all swapped out and torqued down properly in an afternoon so not to bad.

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Joshua White

Got everything installed, got a stock pitman arm for the front, got it reamed out and installed (much less bumpsteer now). Hadn't had a chance to see how the new springs flexed and when you live in the suburbs in Central FL you do some mall crawling to test your stuff...lol

Joshua White

Just ordered a set of driveshafts from Olivers, excited to get those in :-)

Joshua White

Driveshafts made it in, got the metal collected for bumpers/sliders, now I just need to clear some space in the garage and get the time needed to do any of this...lol

Joshua White

Picked up a nice pile of parts to toss at the XJ.

ACOS
New unit bearings
New ball joints
New double din android auto head unit
Qlogic kick panel pods
I'm taking my left over Alpine amps/speakers/sub and installing them in the XJ

After I'm done with this round of upgrades it'll drive better and have a real nice stereo system to enjoy :-)

Joshua White

Just ordered the CavFab Alpha Steering System, I'm about maxed out at my current lift height for steering and track bar (jcr one ton steering and generic "S" bend track bar with frame side drop bracket)

With the new ball joints and bearings installed it drives much better, can't wait to get the Alpha kit in and really have this thing dialed :-)

Joshua White

Installed the Alpha Steering kit Sunday, my BIL has his welder all setup where I still haven't bought a bottle for mine yet so he helped with the welding.

The day started out great, got to his place early and started tearing all the steering and track-bar stuff out, then we went to ream the knuckles and realized that the JCR steering uses much larger rod ends than the 5/8s bolts in the Alpha kit...ok so now we're stopped due to my giant oversight. Luckily my BIL had an old low pinion front axle laying around so we could rob the knuckles off of that but we're still down a pitman arm. We call every parts store in town, no one has one within 100 miles...so off to the wrecking yard we go. We grab a pitman arm off a mid 90s Jeep ZJ and head back to his place. Now we have all the parts we need to keep truckin so he gets on attacking the axle for the new OTA track-bar bracket and I start disassembling the other axle for it's knuckles.

After we get everything torn apart and welded on I start pulling my knuckles off and what do you know when I smack the passenger knuckle off the brand new lower ball joint I had recently installed just comes out with it...(no joke I saw this one coming cause the lower joints were way to easy to press in), ball joint deletes are in my future for SURE! So we mess around with that joint for a bit to get it out of the knuckle and then get it pressed back in with some added tack welds on both lower ball joints to keep them in place for a while.

Alright so onto the steering components, they go in exactly as expected, easy enough to set the toe with the proper brackets bolted to the axle so that helps. Now the track bar and well...it's just too short, we double check the center location of the axle, double check measurements, even though it's too late at this point we double check the OTA bracket to be sure we installed it per the instructions from CavFab and we did (btw instructions don't come with the kit you have to specifically ask for them and all you get is a top down photo of where the bracket should be, no torque specs for the heim bolts, nothing...not very good support if you ask me). So now it's a get it "good enough" to drive home situation, it's off to the driver side about a half inch or so and there just isn't any more adjustment in the track-bar, we're already below the "safe" thread engagement on the heims as it is.

So I reach out to CavFab and ask how long this bar should be end to end, waiting to hear back from them at this point. Maybe I got a random short arm, who knows.

Enough talking, onto the pictures.

Joshua White

After some back and forth with CavFab, seems I'm not the only one experiencing this issue so they're sending out a bar that's an inch longer, should be able to dial it in from there.

Joshua White

Well it's been a bit, but after getting other things fixed that brought the noise level down while driving I noticed a gear whine under acceleration/deceleration, I did some digging and diagnosed that I needed new bearings in the rear axle. So I parked the Jeep not wanting to drive it and possibly explode the gears/LSD...and it sat for months waiting for me to collect parts/tools/time to do a rebuild. Fast forward to last month and I called around to try and find someone that could do this job with the parts I had already purchased. Found a shop in Tampa FL called Red Scorpion, Ron did a great job and got my XJ back to me quickly with great advice and care. After the 2hr drive home stopping every 15-20 mins and not going over 50mph my gear whine is gone! Onto fab work, bolting on some stock skids I picked up, and installing the onboard air system my BIL gifted me :-)

We're headed to Moab in June!

TeXJ

how do you like the cavfab 3 link?

Joshua White

So far so good, it's stable, strong, and flexes well. Cavfab has been ok to deal with, I run their complete steering/OTA track bar setup as well now.

Haven't had the Jeep in the dirt yet for any serious wheeling, breaking in gears/bearings currently.

TeXJ

Sounds good. Been going back and forth between their 3 link and Iron Rock's 3 link.

Joshua White

Took the XJ out for a shake down run this weekend, found some more issues as we tested but that's to be expected.







I'll report back on the issues I've discovered after I've had some time this week to really go over the Jeep.

TeXJ

What were some of the issues you ran into?

Joshua White

I've got some clearance issues when flexing the font axle, mainly the drivers side. My front DS is hitting the upper arm on my three link and the trac bar is hitting the top link mount and my driver spring is rubbing against the frame side track bar mount pretty bad...sounds like it's "ratcheting" up and down the mount as the spring moves. I think there are some compounding issues here:Also...not having AC in central FL is a no go...lol
I either need to get the doors off or get the AC working...preferably both so I can help keep cameras cool and get some cold air to my kids in the back (with creative vent extensions obviously...lol).