Hey Guys, just wanted to give you an update on the progress. Worked on the car yesterday all day with my father-in-law. He’s very experienced with cars and works on all of his cars by himself, so I’m a little lucky to have had that help.
What we finished yesterday:
1. Installed H&R springs and Rancho RS5000X shocks in both the front and back. Luckily after spraying all the bolts two days prior to Saturday the back upper bolts and all the other ones came out fine.The main issue we ran into was the front upper nuts.. so rusted that the shock just spins when trying to unscrew it. We ended up just cutting those off.
2. Next, we installed my
Moog front suspension kit which included the tie rods and track bar (sold separately). That was another animal - not only removing the old rusted parts (we had a pickle fork but some of the ends and screws wouldn’t budge) - but also installing the new moog parts was a headache. The track bar was a fairly simple installation though. The tie rod ends and sleeve were extremely difficult to put on the new moog tie rod. Not sure if this was a product issue or what was going on with it. On one side the tie rod end went on smoothly, but the other side with the sleeve and end was a long and hard fought battle to get that thing on there.
All that’s left uninstalled from the kit is the ball joints for the front (4 total) which need to be pressed in I believe. We left that for another day.
Overall, the Jeep drives so much better!! The Plan is to have the new tires installed on Tuesday (31x10.5R15) while having the alignment done. After this is all complete, the Jeep is going back in the shop for a regear to 4.10 gears from 3.07.