Spring 1995

My Jeep is really loud when you get up to freeway speeds and a lot of noise is coming from the transfer case which is screaming away because of my 5.38 gears. Much of this transfer case noise comes from the intermediate gear which has a really poorly designed bearing system. Anyway, there is a kit you can get from Advanced Adapters that converts the bearing for this gear to regular cone bearings. It costs $175 and you also have to do some machining on the intermediate gear. Well, I kept one of the transfer cases from Alex's stuff and was going to rebuild it and do the bearing conversion on it. I brought it home from Don's house and started taking it apart in Sherene's basement and stinking up the whole house in the process (I need a garage bad!). I got down to the intermediate gear, popped out the shaft, pulled out the gear and low and behold, two cone bearings popped out. The conversion was already done! I was so happy that something finally went my way.

The gears and everything else in the TC looked really good to, almost new so I put it back together, sealed things up nice and tight. Then I crawled under the jeep and took out the old TC which I can almost do blindfolded now. I got the new one back in and bolted up. All I needed to do was slap in the overdrive, connect the drivelines, fill'er up with oil and I was done. Well, the overdrive wasn't going in right. Oh, no, not again. After a quick peek I found out that my old TC was a 29 tooth gear model and the new one was a 26 tooth model. Well, my 29 tooth overdrive was never going to work. I didn't get as lucky as I thought. I did have the gear that replaced the overdrive and put that in instead. Now my top speed was about 45mph and the search was on for someone who wanted to trade a 26 tooth overdrive for a 29 tooth one.

First place I checked was with Richard and Paul. They didn't have anything but referred me to a guy in Vancouver, WA, Herm Tilford who specialized in overdrives. After a quick call it looked like the problem was solved. After checking schedules we decided the best time to do the gear swap was during the auto swap meet at Portland Raceway where Herm had a booth.

The swap meet at Puyallup was nothing compared to this meet. It was not just jeeps but all kinds of cars and it was huge. Herm gave me directions to his booth, I swaped the gears and then wandered around some more. I ran into Richard & Paul again at their booth, then wandered some more. You really needed to spend several days there to see everything but I did manage to find some air pressure gauges I needed to make airing down easier.