Mac's YJ build with tons and 42's.

Been working on a few things on this lately.

Swapped to lighter springs on my coilovers to get more preload,

Tuned the dual rate stop to help with body roll.

Revalved the shocks several times, and much better now.

Ditched the front bilsteins in favor of some Monroe gas shocks for an f350. These have way better valving than the bilsteins and helped improve the ride quality tremendously.

I had bought some fancy shocks for the front but I'll save them for when I link the front.

Added the poison spider louvered hood panel and ditched the Taurus fan setup in favor of a stock fan and clutch setup.

Far more consistent temps and super reliable.

I added some rocker protection and I'm working on a new front grill hoop and bumper. Again thanks to @stinkbomb NTK FabWorks for getting me the hoop short notice.

Also shaved the 14 bolt using a Barnes4wd hi clearance cover.

Time for pics

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Changes are coming!!!!

The jeep had been working well keeping up with several buggies worth 2,3,4x as much as this heep. There is no replacement for seat time. I haven’t upgraded anything over last several years, as everything was working as good as it could, and I was busy working on other people’s rigs and buggies.

Hadn’t wheeled in a while since having our daughter Charlie and been too busy with work.

After several steering pump failures including PSC, trail gear, and oem TC, I’m ditching the hydro assist.

The biggest problem was the 1/8” return port in the Astro van box.

I could outrun the fluid volume on quick back to back turns of wheel, and I’d have to wait for the fluid to catch up. It would feel like the wheel was against a wall ( or feel like no pump assist) until enough fluid could pass thru the box return port.

This was hydraulically dead head the pump and would make the pump bypass. I believe this was one of the reasons for killing a couple pumps. The trail gear pump was just a piece of crap to begin with. The OE replacement tc pumps lasted about as long as the PSC pump.

Only two real options to fix this.

1). Drill thru holes in steering box piston so the box is essentially non power, fill box with oil and cap PS line ports. This would require adding a separate servo upstream of the box to handle fluid to and from the ram. Or use a sweet non power box, and servo to accomplish the same.

2) full hydraulic steering


Option 1 has the liability to create a feedback loop that acts upon the servo to cause the tires to shake L/R.

Meaning you turn wheel, input twists torsion bar in servo, servo send fluid to ram, ram moves tires. The ram pulling on drag link, pulls on steering box, which twists other end of servo torsion rod.

Not all rigs suffer from this with this setup, some require tuning the diameter of the torsion rod in the servo to get enough assist without creating this feed back loop. Another issue is a big impact , twisting the box end of the servo torsion rod, diverting fluid, and ripping the wheel from your hands.

Another issue with option 1, is that on a big hit, you can still rip steering box off the frame or even explode it. The exploded boxes I read about were often after porting this 1/8” return in the box and suffering a big impact.

If anyone wants to read more about that topic, search for 4500 legal steering setups.

With all that said, I’m choosing option 2. Full hydro.

Follow along and see what other changes are happening next.
 
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This is how I’m measuring and locating points for drawing my truss.

There are several DXF both free and paid on the web that are definitely just too generic and needed customizing for my constraints.

Once I realized anything on the market would need to be customized,

I decided I’d rather do most of the work in cad rather than with a grinder.

The idea is that the truss needs to hit the axle tube just before tangent so that the edge of the weld is close, but just above the centerline.

I took a lot of time making sure I could draw two lines on the axle that are where the front and rear vertical pieces of the truss will hit the housing. Making sure these lines represent two parallel planes.

Also had to make sure the locations from the front piece to the rear piece are identical in terms of left right and height. This is because these two plates and where they intersect the housing are very different.
 
Bebop said:
When I grow up I want to be like @Mac5005.
Top notch work and thanks for showing your process.
Click to expand...
My process is very rudimentary compared to laser scanning or modeling the entire diff and then just adding the truss in cad.

My laser scanner is iPhone 14 and Xbox Kinect camera, 🤣.

I figured it’s easier for me to clamp some straight edges and measure 🤷‍♂️.

I just miss older cad programs where you can just type in polar coordinates, that would have been way faster.

I’m just a hack doing the best I can with what I’ve got 🤣.
 
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