I own two business so I get P/L. What I don't get is that the liberty is the most popular small SUV. How when they are down to 10 in the country do they not say... Make me 100 more. Or why these are not sitting on the shelf for back up.. They must know they will need them in the future, so while it is tooled up and ready to cut up some D30a's make a few extra. We are not dealing with a one off Foose custom...
They should buy totaled jeeps and re-man the parts to resell. Three months without a vehicle would screw the average person. They are lucky I have business trucks at my disposal. They finally coughed up a rental.

Don't get me wrong I understand the issue they are having and I have been more then understanding with Chrysler and the Dealership. I still feel they have the best product out of the big three.

The fact that the KJ has not been made for almost 3 years has alot to do with part shortages,they are focusing on vehicle that are still in the OEM warranty period 1st.The KK does not use the same front diff as the KJ does and the current contract with Dana/Spicer is for the KK's D30M's which is not close to the D30A's the KJ uses and no parts are interchangeable between the 2.

Would it be worth doing a little Reverse Engineering and come up with a stronger case that would hold the stock guts?
I would guess the stock case is 356 aluminum alloy, ductile iron would weigh more but would be almost twice as stronger. Aren't the cast portions of SFA housings ductile iron?
Sand casting is common knowledge and machining the case cant be that bad.

Looked into that a few years ago,about $30,000 for the mold and if you had 1000 units made it would be about $1000-$2000 per unit after machining.Not cheap.

I would love to see the actual fracture surface of some of these broken diffs. Some people abuse theirs off road and never have a problem. Others break doing something mundane. I would suspect some kind of casting seam or porosity is contributing to the weakness in the pinion area in just a few diffs.

The major engineering flaw is the fact that the pinion bearing/shaft support area is so long compared to other IFS diffs. Meaning it has all the more leverage when in a bind to split that area open. If the Jeep engineers had forseen this, all it would take to fix the major flaw and increase carrier strength by at least 15% would have simply been to make the pinion gear shaft shorter and drive shaft longer. But with the buying market like it is and what they were going after, the people who control the money were more concerned with "NVH" (noise, vibration, harshness) than ultimate offroad reliability, hence the concession to IFS in the 1st place to increase on-road feel, smoothness, and driveability. Cause with a longer driveshaft, the ability to control vibrations becomes harder and more costly.

And to be truly honest, they hit a sales home run when the Liberty when on sale and to this day is still their single best selling vehicle, the vast majority of which rarely if ever even engage 4wd. What we use ours for makes up such a minority of KJ's/KK's that it's pure fantasy to think or want Jeep to cater to our needs.

Some fab shops like to quote outrageous prices and make recreational aircraft payments as a courtesy of their clientele. I would take all the critical dimensions and produce a drawing, then cut a case in half along the line where the plate between the cope and the drag goes, use the inside the case for a pattern to make the cores (expanding foam should work to get the impression), use the impressions to make a core box using an industrial version of Bondo, mount the split case onto a board and fill in the holes with filler, beef the case up where needed and make sure the draft angle is good. Then, start casting.
This project is more of a College Engineering project, the quote they gave you was a self regulated retirement project.
Did that guy have a Piper or Cessna next to his mansion?

Ok for you folks that keep talking about P/L on diff's for the KJ, remember the USA is not the only country on this planet and is not the only place on the planet that has KJ's. There is a WORLD MARKET and the KJ is all over this round ball we live on. There might be 11,000 KJ CRD's sold in the USA but there are mroe that 100,000 sold in Europe, not to mention other parts of the world. The important part is to find out WHERE the diffs were made and then go from there to see what the hold up is. What may not be in the USA may be in abundance in another part of the world.

BTW I just got a set of springs from H&R this way, none in the USA but all over Europe they are available. I contacted H&R HQ in Germany and I am getting a set sent to H&R USA to be sent to a dealer I can buy them from.