What's up man
Your cherokee is coming along nice...I wanted to ask when you installed that track bar did you have to redrill the hole in the track bar mount? If you did what size did you still it to?
I'm asking because I bought one off Craigslist for $20 and was looking at the bolt and it's huge compared to the stock track bar....

 

No I didnt. The bolt on the frame end was actually too small almost. I want to replace it with a bigger one soon.

And 20 is a great deal!

 

Thanks. I need it. Im having a hard time getting to the rearmost bolt on the exhaust.

Nope. Its a 120 MPH one because its a police package XJ. Other than that I dont know why it would.

 

Oh, I had no idea the police packages had a different cluster. I really like it.

Which exhaust bolt are you talking about? The one on the manifold, that's on the stud? I used a short extension, a u-joint adapter and a long extension to get that bastard out.

 

I got it with a ratcheting wrench. Was still a PITA.

Anyways the headgaket was pretty messed up. 99% sure thats the cause of my compression problems.

The cylinder walls and pistons seem to be in great shape for 202,500 miles.

Im going to take the dremel to the head and intake and get them cleaned up some before they go back on.

Will check in around 3. I got to go to a doctors appointment.

Hoping to have it back together by friday. Was going to Uwharrie but instead I got to go haul my sisters H22 swapped 92 Civic.

 

I'm not so sure that's a good idea...that could give you even more problems. You should have it properly machined by a machine shop while you have it apart. Do it right the first time.

 

I am just going to clean it out. Im actually probably just going to get the gunk out.

I know I probably should get it machined, but I cant afford it right now. Eventually I will just rebuild the whole thing but for now I think it will be fine.

 

Took a wire brush to the ports. Cleaned up good.

Found oit it has a 7120 head off of a 94. So thats good.

 

Torquing the head bolts back down.

 

Here are some pictures.

Got up early to start




Started disconnecting stuff


Valve Cover


Most of the coolant is from the water jackets. Didnt all of the coolant didnt drain and went into the cylinders.




Old headgasket. You can see at the top cylinder it wasnt very good and the old one had a lot of places that were messed up letting coolant and loosing compression.






Cleaned the head, scraped off the old gasket, and cleaned it out some




Valves



New headgasket in place



Head bolted back on and torqued



This is as far as I got. Went to go get the intake/exhaust gasket to put on but it got really cold out really quick and im tired so I will finish the morning.

 

Been out here 2 and a half hours. Almost done. Should be around 12.

 

Nice work so far, I haven't had to do a head yet but it looks pretty easy

 

Its really not too bad. Keeping up with bolts and stuff is really the hardest part.

 

sweet jeep.... have you still been keeping track of the money you have into it this far??
never heard of the police set up before what does the ext idle switch do??

looks like there was minimal to no sludge on your head, you should have done a shade tree port job while it was out along with polishing pistons, valves ... gives you and warm and fuzzy feeling when you're done...

 

It's a switch down where the fog light switch would be. Flip it on and your XJ will idle at 1k rpm. I've read somewhere that it's easy to do this mod to any 97+ XJ as apparently the connection for it is all there on the PCM--just need to wire it up.

I once kept a spreadsheet of expenses on my XJ....lost track of that real quick. lol