Finally got some time to give the ZJ a little attention. Crawled under it to investigate the trans leak, appears that its coming out of the overdrive housing like the PO suggested it might be. The PO had a shop and rebuilt the transmission himself, which is nice because these trannys aren't known for lasting very long.... but if he couldn't get a gasket to seal right, I'm not sure I trust his work. Never taken apart an automatic trans before, but it looks like I'll have to pull it to get to that gasket anyway, and I'd hate to pull it and replace the gasket just to have it blow up on me in 10k... so I'm thinking that my best option is to pick up a trans out of a ZJ being parted out or something and just swap that in.
After I get it in DD condition, I found a Ford HP60 and a 14b to toss in it. Matching gear ratios, so I can toss em in and get the suspension all set up and run them as they are until I can afford a good set of gears. As for gears, I'm thinking 4.88 is gonna be the sweet spot for fairly low RPMs while driving and a decent crawl ratio on the trails. Not gonna bother with lockers, I'll just weld both ends... its cheap and it works.
Haven't decided on a width yet though, I think about 3" wider than ZJ-width
would look pretty good, but I dunno if its worth the work.
Now I know I'm gonna catch some flak for this, but I'm looking at 38-40" tires and 4.5" lift. I'm expecting 4.5" springs will net me around 6-6.5" total when taking into account the larger diameter axle tubes and the height of the coil buckets, and I
should be able to stuff 38-40s under there without a ridiculous amount of trimming. ZJ fenders have built in flares, so for any trimming that needs to be done I'll be widening the openings in the fenders so they'll look factory by cutting the flares, spacing em out forward and upward, and filling in the spaces with some sheet metal.
Here's a build I found over on mallcrawlin.com running 40's on 4.5," so I know it CAN be done :gee: