04 TJR rebuild

[Van]

You know how something as simple as painting a room can lead to remodeling your entire house? That's sort of the feeling I'm getting with my 04 TJR. I've had it about three years now, it's my first Jeep, and I've gone through the fluids, brakes, cooling, etc. but haven't really done much to the suspension, which was a Rubicon Express short arm 4" lift. I've enjoyed off-roading it and have learned much about maintenance and repairs from following this forum.

Anyway, the Jeep had a slight lean to the passenger side that had gotten worse. It was bad enough that I could see it across the hood while driving and could feel it in my seat. It was also visible from the rear.

So I decided that instead of adding spacers, I'd go ahead and replace the coils, my first real suspension modification/upgrade. I decided that I wanted to keep my 35s and 4" lift (I had considered going down to 33s), and after some research, I decided to go with Currie 4" springs. Currie recommended CE-9132FPs in front, CE9131RH3Ps (LJ) in rear for my setup, and I bought them from Summit Racing. After perusing many threads on here about extracting coils, I disconnected the sway bars, control arms, and shocks and was finally able to remove my old coils and install the new ones without having to use spring clamps, which was something I didn't want to mess with. Kind of easy to see why I thought I was on the side of a hill just sitting in my driveway!

"While I was in there anyway LOL", I figured now was the time to try to soften my ride, and I bought some Rancho 5000X shocks to replace my Bilsteins. So I worked on the rear axle first, and doing this work took me a couple of evenings, given this was my first time and having a few issues with reattaching the control arms! Anyway, I got it drivable again and was able to sort of compare the new Ranchos on the rear with my Bilsteins on the front, at least over the speed humps in my neighborhood! It may have been in my head, but I convinced myself there was a difference in ride, so I was happy.

But in going through all this, I disconnected my control arms and saw just how worn and loose they were. So then I started looking at control arms and whether to rebuild or replace...more to follow.

 

[Van]

I strongly considered rebuilding the Rubicon Express control arms but in the end decided to replace them. I looked at Currie and MC but settled on the Metalcloak arms. For one, they don't require lubrication, and I'd be unable to add grease to a few of the RE arm bushings. For another, my local 4x4 shop handles MC and had a set of arms in stock. Plus, they were somewhat cheaper than the Currie arms.

So then I started the replacement process, thinking that I'd drop each RE arm off, set the new arms to the same length, and stick them back in. At that point I wanted a better understanding of how to set the arm length in the first place, not knowing how the PO had set them or whether they were "correct." That's when I found threads on here discussing control arm installation and about cycling the axle to full bump and centering the coil perch against the bump stop. So I worked on the rear axle first, removing the coils I had so laboriously installed earlier and going through the process. I found the original arms weren't set up this way.

So I adjusted the lower control arms to center the coil perches against the bump stops and the uppers to visually set the pinion angle. Lots of back and forth from under the jeep to adjusting the jack. Anyway, I finally got them set and approximately square, so I moved to the front axle the next day.

There I found the same problem and actually had to cut a corner off the driver spring perch in order to center it correctly. I had occasionally heard and felt a loud clunk during severe articulation but couldn't figure out what it was. I found it here.

Here's the front one centered.

Finally got the arms installed but didn't really set the caster angle properly, and the steering was loose. I took it to local shop, and they set both drive shaft angles correctly. Now it's all good.