TJ is peak. Anyone tried to de-modernize theirs?

Interesting. Fuel injection and a distributor. That's half-way to where I'm trying to get.

I am not a transmission expert. I do have the 32rh and I assume it is controlled entirely by the computer. Is it possible to have an automatic without a computer? Manual is of course better for this.
A manual valve body allows to you to shift an auto. Older trans are computer-less. Example being turbo 400. A very sought after trans.
 
Been in a lot of carbed jeeps, I would never go back. It really sucks trying to get one restarted and keep them running on long steep hill climbs, especially with a manual
 
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Last night I completely forgot that about 16 years ago I actually ditched EFI in favor of carburetion on a car I owned.

The qualifiers I should mention however, was that the EFI system was a primitive Bosch system on a 1976 Datsun that had no O2 sensors (open loop only!) and a vane airflow meter and injectors that were near maxed out with the stock airflow. The was no way to make it work on my cammed, ported, 6-1 longtube headered, 10.5:1 compression motor so my options were to toss it out completely and build my own Megasquirt system and have it tuned, or get my hands on manifold and set of (3) 2-bbl Weber carburetors. I chose the latter, because I found the parts used for 20% of what a Megasquirt setup would have run me, and I was 19 on a college student budget.

A dedicated throttle plate for each cylinder sounded freakin' awesome and it had no problem squealing tires in 3rd gear. I don't know if I would do anything different in that situation given my options (and the fact that I didn't live in an area with any significant elevation change), but after that...
1. I couldn't let anybody drive my car in the winter without a 5 minute demonstration on how to get it started in the morning.
2. with a 7 pound flywheel I had to let it warm up before I could drive it away because I had no inertia to help get the car moving without stalling.
3. Balancing 3 carburetors was annoying enough that I gave the buyer the tools to do it because I never planned on doing it again.
4. With 3 bowls of fuel, a bad fuel pump will let you drive a mile and a half from your girlfriends house before it finally runs out on your way home to get your Nokia cell phone. At the top of an overpass with a narrow shoulder. That was a fun day.
 
They have the right idea. Not saying they don't have problems.

I would have agreed with you in 1995. The ones I had from back then were rock solid and very well engineered. My dad, brother, and I went through a phase where BMW's and Merc's were about all we drove...Between all of us we had a 635CSi, a couple of E30 M3's, two E30 convertibles, a 735i, a 528e, an E28 M5, a couple of E classes, an E36 328i, an E34 535i...all great cars, reliable, easy to work on, and reasonable to maintain.

Somewhere in the last 20 years, German automotive engineers decided they were prescient enough to design things without actually testing them to validate their designs. My favorite example is how they all jumped onto the gasoline turbo direct injection bandwagon around 2007ish without actually running them long enough to understand how much the acceptable windows shrink for all sorts of operating parameters with those types of engines. Almost all of the early ones have to have the valves cleaned every 30k miles due to the lack of cleaning action by the fuel mist washing over them that they would get in a port injection engine. They also invented a thing unique to those types of engines called Low Speed Preignition that still isn't that well understood...but somewhere along the lines in an effort to cut down on it they asked the motor oil manufacturers to modify their additive packages to reduce the amount of oil mist that circulated back to the combustion chamber through the PCV system. But in the mean time the knock sensors are so sensitive to pick it up that they pick up other nuisance things like a timing chain that isn't brand new and occasionally taps on the guides or the tensioner (which are plastic and have to be replaced periodically, combining the worst features of the timing chain with the same of the timing belt). I had a German engineered (BMW) Mini Cooper S that had some of these problems, as well as a number of others where at 100k miles I was replacing parts with date stamps that were already several years newer than the car. And these were parts that should have been simple and on many cars outlast the vehicle itself...parts like thermostat housings and vacuum pumps, overcomplicated and undervalidated so they last 50k miles and cost $250.

An example that many of us here are familiar with is when Daimler got hold of Chrysler and in 2005 replaced a perfectly good OPDA on the Jeep 4.0 with a different one that had an inadequately lubricated bushing that fails and takes out the camshaft anywhere from 20k miles and up, and integrated the transmission controller with a PCM that's prone to failing when from 1997-2004 they had been just fine.

That's the end of my rant, but I at least deserve credit for bringing it back full circle to the complexities introduced during the run of the TJ. ;)
 
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