Quote:
Originally Posted by dru
Brad, all the best on your investigation!
I'm no expert but have been heading down a similar road. We started with a 2014 Rubicon. Lifted and shod it with 34" or 315 70 R17. I found crawl speed not slow enough in technical bits on the 4.10 diff ratios.
We did an axle seal to the front diff and used this as an excuse to reconsider the ratios and diffs. Just updated to 4.88 ratios. On advice we stiffened the front D44. Aparently the Jeep D44 isnt as strong as they used to be. We used inner axle sleaves and arranged external seals.
General advice was that was enough and that the rear is fine. Though ultimately we included a front welded truss, C gussets and aftermarket ball joints.
Looks strong.
The crawl gears are truly great. Im still trying to assess impact on fuel economy but there is a definite impact on highway driving. To the worse.
While I dont do a lot of beach or desert driving I dont get the ratios being a problem in sand. Surely you just go up a gear.
Was a Rubicon the right start point? Probably not. In retrospect a Sport may have been a cheaper start point.
Enjoy!
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Thanks for sharing. I'm leaning towards going down a similar path as you and starting with the Rubicon. The more I look into buying a buy a Dana 44 out of the US, the more expensive it gets. It's looking like I really won't have any change from $4300-ish just to get a complete new stock Rubicon complete front axle. I'd prefer to just buy a Rubicon as the price difference between Rubicon and Sport is only about $5000 and with the Rubicon I get the rear locker as well so even if I buy a Sport + $4300 for Dana 44 then $1500 for a rear locker, it's cheaper to just buy a Rubicon, even if I do throw away the gear sets.
