Tech

Now that my 93 YJ is coming along since it was last seen putting on the Dick Cepek 3 1/2″ lift. I put some 33×12.50 15 Dunlop Mud Rovers and with the 2.5l 4cyl my gas mileage was down a bit. It was said that the YJ’s all had 20-gallon tanks but they modified them to only hold 15 gallons. …

Electricity… it’s one of those things that you never think about until it stops working, then you wonder how you’ll ever survive without it. You flip a switch, the light comes on, you flip it again, the light goes out – you never even give it a second or even a first-thought. Your driveshafts probably fall into that same category …

Summer is now in full swing and even in the calm Midwestern states, it’s blistering hot. While a hot engine is great for cooking foil wrapped hot dogs and convenience store burritos, it is not so hot (get it? “Not so hot”… we crack ourselves up) for the life expectancy of your engine and transmission. When we wrote part one …

Tire Grip, we know just how important it is while we are climbing a ledge or traversing down a large rock. But, not only is traction important while we are wheeling, but also while driving on the street. This leads us to our latest tech review on a very effective, yet inexpensive traction aid. It’s called siping. We’ve seen this …

We know we’re in for virtual beatdown, just by writing this article. I can see the flaming emails now… “I can’t believe you left the Muncie RockCrusher off of the list”, or “You guys suck, what about the PowerGlide?!”. But that’s ok – we like getting these letters, because it means that you have a pulse, and you can at …

 Sure, there are welding carts that you can buy… some are el-cheapo units and may last a few years (see our Harbor Freight review from 2005) and some are mega-expensive units that are still nothing more than a fancy utility cart that is often a ‘one-size-fits-all’ design that may or may not actually fit, or do what you want it …

It all started when I was visiting Jody, our Tech Editor, in Tucson, AZ and we were working on a few projects for the magazine. As we were hammering and welding away, he mentioned that if we had time that he wanted to make some American flags using his plasma cutter in a silhouette fashion. We never did get to …

Vehicle-Side Steering Components   There are a number of ways to convert your vehicles steering, if needed. Our project FJ40 had used a prototype front-to-back steering system with a 4” drop steering bar (S-Bar), similar to the steering on ’82-’85 Toyota Pickup trucks. While this prototype gave us power steering with little fabrication on our stock axle, it posed too …

Axle-Side Steering Components: This is where it may get tricky, depending on what you choose to do. In our minds, logic dictated that if we were going to go through the work of swapping out an axle, we’d spend the extra time and money on components that would be durable and strong. Here were our choices:    Severe Duty Tie …

What we had to do to get the axle mounted: U-Bolt Flip Kit (Stage West 4-Wheel Drive Center, $145) We chose to install a U-Bolt flip kit during our installation and we highly recommend you do the same thing. This will save an inch or so of precious ground clearance and protect the nuts and threads of the U-Bolts from …