It’s been a busy several weeks with the holidays and the recent promotion at work. However, I have been driving the XJ a lot more and I’ve noticed a few minor issues.
The first thing we noticed was that the vibrations were horrible. We had snow once last month and when driving I noticed I had lost 4 Full Time. The two things combined (vibrations and lost t-case position) made me start thinking the issue was the transfer-case. I went to a salvage yard that said the NP242 that I received only had 117,000 miles on it so I went ahead and picked it up. We swapped it in an afternoon and that got rid of the real nasty vibrations.
HOWEVER, I still have lingering vibes. I then went and bought a brand new front drive shaft as well as a double cardon rear drive shaft to hopefully deal with what is apparently a minor lift. They seem to be built very well and got rid of more of the vibrations, but still not all of them. This last week I then decided to add some shims to the rear differential since a double cardon drive shaft shouldn’t have an angle on the rear u-joint. We got most of the angle out with 6 degree shims but there’s still a very minor pulsing vibration.
Our next attempt will be to drop the transfer case a little to see if that’ll help the angle and, therefore, eliminate the vibration. I really want to take this Jeep on some real adventures this summer so I’m hoping this can take care of the vibes.