Hey everyone, tried using the search feature but didn’t find any good info. I’m looking at putting wide Rubicon 392 axles in the XJ as part of reviving it to get it going again. Sory for the long post.
General history is this XJ was my first car, beat the living heck out of it for years had lots of fun but it is now been sitting for about five years. I just did the work to get it started to move to the new house and decided now is the time to breath life again.
It currently has a partial cage, trussed axles with custom heim joint steering and track bar, no sway bars, sliders, bumpers, 33 inch tires, cut fenders lots of dents. 5 of the belly pan skid mounting bolts all sheared along with a broken track bar bracket last time I had it out.
I got a great deal on a complete set of 2022 Rubicon 392 unlimited axles 5.13 gears, these came with the lockers, shafts, hub bearings, LJ steering, even the calipers and everything! They only have 21K miles on them.
The next stage of this Jeep is gonna be slow but I’m planning and wanted to get opinions on long arm suspension install with these axles. My general plan is to make new crossmember/center skid with long arm mounts. I will then make the long arms myself and push the axle forward a few inches by moving the coil buckets back on the axle housing(and I realize the amount of work that comes with doing that but I am on board for it). I plan on shortening the doors and doing integrated sliders with boat sides down to the frame. I’ll redo my rear bumper so it integrates to the external cage I have partially completed but never fully tied in( it will obviously integrate with the sliders as well).
Everything I see shows that TJ swap kits keep the upper control arm mounts for the front axle. So that should work with the XJ. The lower control arm mounts on the swap kits are a little bit different I assume from the frame being wider on the LJ but since I am switching to long arms and planning on doing the arms myself I thought why not just truss the axle and keep the heavy duty Artech mounts that are already welded on this assembly?
Would also love opinions on switching to coils in the rear as well. If I do that it will be a triangulated four link. I wanna keep this next stage of the build in budget, not really sure what that budget is but by the time I buy 37s or larger tires and likely CV joints for the front axle- tuned coil overs will be out of the budget.
Any one here swap the newer wide HD 44 Rubicon axles?
any thoughts on suspension set ups?

 

That looks like a sweet pair of axles! Great score. I'm just coming off a JK axle swap on my XJ.

I'm not terribly familiar with the TJ/LJ setup, but I would assume the lower control arm mounts should be in the same place because they both used the same Dana 30 front axles with the same LCA brackets and placement. The Artec stuff is pretty great. It all fits well. I used many of their brackets on my swap.

Coils in the rear with a 4 link is awesome, but its a whole bunch of work. If you want budget and to keep the scope small, stick with leaf springs. You can always cut perches off and go to 4 link later down the road.

The new wide-track axles are sweet. With my JK axles being 65" WMS, I wanted them to be a bit wider than stock while also running higher backspaced wheels to keep my scrub radius low. While I was able to accomplish this, and it works great, I actually wouldn't have minded a bit more width to keep the tires away from the body more. Running the JL axles with high backspaced wheels will be a great setup, if that's what you're going for.


edit: also, definitely join the "Jeeps with JK/JL Axles" Group on Facebook. Really good knowledgeable group

 

Thanks, I’ll definitely join the Facebook group. One of my front leaf spring mounts has been sheared and smashed so badly I have to reach through a hole in the floor with a box end to take the bolt out 🤦‍♂️, I also have some pretty good rear frame damage from when the car was a lot newer and didn’t have a good rear recovery point,
so I figured “ I need to fix those things and replace the driveshaft. Might as well just redesign the entire truck!” 😁