DaveB
Long Jeep Fan
- Location
- Holladay, Utah
Well the last day or so I have been re-working the RE long arm upgrade that my brother had put on his LJ because I was too busy to do it at the time. Well he got it back from the well known shop and had all kinds of problems with it. He had bad vibrations, steering issues and an axle that wasn't centered. Well I dug into it and on the front axle they didn't take the time to adjust the upper links on the Ylink and he had 14 degrees of caster, a nasty driveline angle, and springs that rubbed the bump stop post. A quick adjustment to the upper arms fixed the caster, driveline angle and the spring rub. The rear axle was a bit more complicated. They had the pinion tipped up 15 degrees like you would do for a CV driveline and about 6 inches of lift. Trouble is he only has 4.5" of lift and a standard driveline. The rear U joint on the driveline was shot and all of that created a nasty driveline vibration. It was obvious that the shop didn't run the system through a droop and flex test. On a droop the shock shafts bound up with the spring buckets due to the extreme up tilt on the axle. On a stuff the upper drivers side control arm was smashing a wiring harness and hitting the brake line mount point. An adjustable track bar in the rear got the rear axle centered. I was able to adjust everything to where it should be and it now drives MUCH better. It did take me three trips to autozone to get the right joint for the driveline, their system doesn't call out the correct joint for an LJ Rubicon.
