Ownership Verified: Polishing a turd. 1973 GMC Sprint, with a side of XJ

[73GMCSprint]

I can report the vents work quite well.

Today I ran a trail I did 2 1/2 months ago. Despite the ambient temperature being 20-30 degrees F warmer today than that run, the coolant temp was consistently 10-30 degrees cooler. Definite win in my book.

 

[loose_unit]

That's awesome! Great work ?

 

[73GMCSprint]

It was time for some work on the XJ.

What goodies are in these?

The cure for a rapidly progressing case of Death Wobble.

The old stuff.

Old vs. New. I decided to swap the anemic XJ tie rod for a beefier ZJ one. For whatever reason the standard XJ drag link has larger tie rod ends than the tie rod. Most of the upgrade in the ZJ tie rod is in its larger tie rod ends, which are the same size as the drag link ends (I hope that made sense).

And...the new stuff installed. For today I just measured the lengths of the old drag link and tie rod and adjusted the new ones to match. I should probably do an actual alignment but I'll wait until after I rebuild the steering box to measure and see if it needs it. Or I might not. It goes down the road straighter than before and no more death wobble (Yay).

A couple of weekends ago we got 1.5" of rain, which called for a therapeutic mud bath.

If anyone is interested, I can give part numbers for the ZJ tie rod swap.