Ok, here goes. This is long, so long-post haters, turn back now. . .
Bub (KJ 119/ One One Niner) came up from Metairie (New Orleans) and met me at Lee's (mcinfantry) house in Watson (who has a full 2-post vehicle lift) on Saturday for the lift install. Much love and thanks to those two, (and Lee's buddy Fred) for their hospitality and assistance. I would be driving a rental car right now if not for them.
Last week I received two boxes of goodies to add to the JBA 4.5 Upper Control Arms I bought off of tommudd:
This is the "Jeepin' By Al's Adjust-A-Strut (AAT) 2.5" Lift Kit" for the KJ CRD. The Skyjacker box is the rear coils, the long skinny box contained two preassembled coilover strut towers with attached custom clevises, 2 Terraflex bumpstops, 2 (custom?) polyurethane rear bumpstops, stainless steel brake lines, two Bilstein remote-reservoir rear shocks, and stickers various and sundry. The top-right box is some Gen 4.5 JBA UCA's I bought off tommudd about a month ago.
Here are some before pics:
Sagged stock suspension (check out the angle of the CV's in the second pic):
Average measurement from hub center to flare was 18.5", with the driver's side front the worst at 18" even.
(Passenger front)
(Driver front)
We started with the back, and ran into our first roadblock. The supplied stainless-steel brake lines are for the 2005 model, not the 2006, so it was only 2 for the front and one for the rear - frame rail-to-axle. Also, since the "Contents" part of the instruction page was for a different lift, I wasn't sure I had all the parts since the new passenger front strut came with a new, longer clevis bolt (but no nut), the driver's side clevis (different, because of the CRD) had no bolt or nut, and the shipping box was torn open on one corner. I got Marlin on his cell, who told me that I was supposed to re-use the driver's side lower clevis bolt and nut, and re-use the passenger-side lower clevis nut, and that he would send me the ABS brake line kit first thing Monday morning.
With the Jeep up on the lift, Lee and I disassembled and installed the rear first while we waited on Bub to get there:
It involved drilling into the lower coil plate to bolt in the new bumpstops ("A Jeep's not yours till you drill that first hole in it") and placing both the bumpstop and the coil into the housing together, then tightening down the Hex-head bolt that holds the bumpstop to the plate. That done, we installed the Bilstein remote-reservoir rear shocks. Bub got there about that time and helped compress the shock pistons while we bolted them in:
We were afraid that attaching the reservoirs onto the shock tube with the supplied bracket would cause it to rub on either the coil or the tire, so we looped the line and tucked the reservoirs up between the frame rail and the splash guard. This is the part that is unfinished, because they are loose in there and rattling quite a bit. I think it's a good place for them, but I have to mess around with fixing the reservoirs in there better before I will be satisfied with that placement.
I wish now that we had wrapped the reservoirs in pipe wrap and zip-tied them to the inside of the splash guard, but we were behind schedule and still needing to get to the front, so we called it good and moved on.
Front disassembly went smooth; the stock stuff was so shot that it offered little to no resistance when we pulled it out. I don't have a lot of pictures of the front because I was concentrating more on the install, and basically forgot to take step-by-step pics.
We started the front install on the driver's side, since it is the most difficult. With the old A-Arms out, we tried to place the new driver's side tower in and ran into the second snag: the strut tower comes preassembled and preset for height, and it was simply too long to cram in the space. We removed the top-plate from the strut tower, installed it in the subframe, and then were able to get the tower in and attach it to the strut plate.
Third snag: the tower was simply too long to mate up to the lower clevis bracket without compressing the strut. Since I had asked - and been assured - that no spring compressor was necessary, we were at a loss. After disconnecting the front swaybar and trying it that, way, we briefly considered disconnecting the lower A-Arm from the lower ball joint to drop it enough to attach the lower clevis. Due to the myriad of things that could go wrong there, we threw in the towel and went and rented a spring compressor.
Long story short, the space between the strut and the coil is too narrow to get a good seat with the compressor, so that didn't work. Then Lee's buddy Fred had the brilliant idea of raising the adjustment collars as high up as possible, then seeing if we could use a prybar in the clevis to compress the assembly enough to bolt in. It worked! When you screw the adjustment rings up about 1.5 inches, the coil is then hand-loose on the tower. So, we used the prybar braced against the lower A-Arm bracket, Fred muscled it into place, and we ran the bolt home and impacted that sucker before it could protest. I wish I had had instructions that told me that. . . .
After installing the JBA UCA on the driver's side (always a breeze,
) and bolting everything back together, we moved on to the passenger side and repeated what we learned on the driver's side. It went much easier, since we now knew what we were doing. Starting the passenger side, we were about 8 hours into the lift.
Note the "KJ" in the passenger side clevis - a nice touch, IMHO. . .
. . . and the difference between the passenger-side clevis and the driver's side clevis, due to the tighter CV angle of the CRD.
We finished the passenger side re-assembly with new A-Arm after about 1.5 hours, put everything back together under the hood, lowered the adjustment collars on the front struts back to where we marked them before loosening, bled the brakes, and called 'er done. we started at 7:30 am, and finished at about 10:00 pm. Here are some (blurry, sorry) measurement pics after we got Greenie back on the ground:
New measurements were about 21.25" in the front, and 21.5" in the back. Here's a pic after the MUCH-NEEDED alignment:
(again, the before)
So to summarize: I'm happy with the lift - the materials, the height, the adjustability, but I spent a large portion of Saturday being pissed about the lack of instructions. This would have been a comparitve breeze if we had known that we could raise the collars, compress the piston, and lever the clevis into place. Would have saved us at least 3 hours, too. If Marlin updates his instructions rather than re-using the instructions for an old Skyjacker lift, this would be a great kit - and likely even easier than a Frankie, based on what Bub said, who installed a Frankie on his CRD.
