Jeep XJ (Cherokee) Budget Build

[DavidClark]

Good stuff man, glad to see you doing something for yourself. tuned in

[Triticum Agricolam]

I played around with a different sub yesterday.  This one is a dual 8" push-pull slot loaded ported enclosure.  

It has the subs mounted very close together with one reverse mounted.  The idea is that this cancels out any asymmetrical excursion anomalies and reduces some types of distortion.  Its an interesting idea, I'm not sure how much benefit it has in practice, but interesting none the less.  The port has a large flare at the mouth and that is where the subs are mounted, here is what that looks like:

I have three other subs of various types I'd like to try out.  I plan on listening to each for a week or so and them hopefully come to some kind of conclusion as to what I want to build for this vehicle.  

 

After I swapped out the sub I got out my measurement mic and spent some time messing with the 3 band EQ in my head unit.  Here is what resulted:

The green line is the frequency response before I started, and the purple line is what I ended up with.  Its not a huge difference, but the frequency response is moderately flatter after my adjustments.  The 3 band EQ isn't super flexible, but its a lot better than nothing.  Later I plan on measuring just the sub so that I can make some good comparison between different subwoofers as I swap them out.  

[notorious97200]

That dual 8 box is nice. I'd love to make a listen...of all of those enclosures ! WoW  

Thanks for sharing your build. 

I'm tuned in.

[bcbrassard]

On 3/26/2017 at 6:39 PM, Triticum Agricolam said:

I washed it off and took some pics to compare how it looks with the lift on it.  I also have my "new" wheels on.  I found a deal for five factory TJ wheels with almost new Cooper 30x9.5" tires for $480, couldn't pass it up.  The allow wheels look a lot better than the half rusted steelies that were on there, IMHO.  I also got rid of the door bumper panels that were starting to fall off anyway.  

Amazing how some serious TLC can make it look 100% better. I had a 91 Sport with the high output 6 in it. Black w/ tinted windows and had those rims. Always wanted to lift it but the wife got it in the divorce in 2000. Used as a smash up derby vehicle cause bitch was a horrible driver.(still is... A Bitch and a horrible driver! LOL) tuned in for your build man. 

[Triticum Agricolam]

It was rainy all day yesterday and I couldn't do any farming, so I decided to work on my headliner.  The headliner that was in there was in rough shape, lots of little tears:

Getting it out wasn't too tough.  Just have to take off the trim around the edges, and the visors and dome lights:

I bought some new headliner fabric from a fabric store, putting it on just entailed pealing the old stuff off, spraying on some contact adhesive and sticking the new stuff down.  I forgot to take pictures of the process, but here is how it looks with the new fabric on it:

While I had the headliner out, I figured it was a good time to sound deaden the roof, here is what I started out with:

Sound deadener is on:

And here it is with the closed cell foam over the deadener:

Reupholstered headliner back in!

 

My upholstery skills need a bit of work, its far from perfect, but it looks a LOT better than what was in there to start with.  Sound deadening the room did seam to reduce the road noise a bit, but it wasn't a big difference.  I'm still glad I did it though.  

 

 

 

 

[bcbrassard]

That looks pretty easy to remove the way they designed the trim. Nice to not have to remove a shit ton of panels to get it out. One nice big rectangle to work with.

[Triticum Agricolam]

Another day, another sub.

I took the dual 8" PPSL sub out and put my 40 Hz 12" tapped horn sub in:

Its a PA focused design, with a PA driver in it, so quite a bit different.  The sub has an 8 ohm impedance so its getting a LOT less power than the other subs have, (probably about 100 watts max), but its so much more efficient there isn't a large difference in output.  I'll run with this sub for a week or so and see how I feel about it. 

 

 

[WalledSonic]

Its neat seeing you toy with these different box designs. Cool stuff

[Triticum Agricolam]

The headlights on these Jeeps really kinda suck, so I've been upgrading mine a bit.  

The first thing I did was replace the stock sealed beam headlights with some Autopal Euro spec H6054 head lamps.  These are what I got: http://www.ebay.com/itm/331498869251

Here are the new ones (left) compared to stock (right)

I took before and after pics to compare the performance between the two.  This is the low beams, stock on top, new Autopal lights on the bottom:

 

And here is the high beams:

 

I feel like both the headlights put out the same amount of total light, but where the light gets focused is very different.  The Autopal shines the light much more ahead than the factory lights did, which I like better.  For only just over $40 I'm pretty happy with the upgrade.  

 

The next thing I did was to upgrade the factory headlight wiring.  A lot of folks say the factory wiring is really undersized/poorly designed.  I got a H4 wiring harness from eBay.  This is what it looks like:

"Big Lamp Brilliance Intensifier of Autocar".....seems legit :-)  

But hey the "circuit already got the function of insurance" so I should be good to go, right?

All joking aside, for $20 the harness looks pretty good.  It plugs into the factory light connector where it would go into the headlamp.  It then uses that power to switch some relays that are wired directly to the battery.  It uses a much larger wiring gauge than the factory harness.  

 

To see what difference it makes I took some voltage measurements before and after installation.  These were taken with the engine running.

This is the low beam voltage at the headlamp:

11.25, not looking good.  Here is what I got with the high beams on:

11.02, even worse.  

 

I installed the harness and took another measurement:

13.68, which is a hell of a lot better.  I got the same measurement with both high and low beams, which I interpret as a good thing.  I did some reading, with halogen bulbs you lose a lot of output at reduced voltage.  I was losing over 2.6 volts with the factory wiring, which means my headlights were probably only putting out about half of their rated lumens.

I took pictures of the performance of the headlights after the upgraded wiring, here is the low beams (factory wiring on top, upgraded on bottom):

 

And the high beams:

All I have to say is holy shit did that make a difference!  Definitely worth the $20.  

I happened to drive home after dark tonight, for the roughly $60 I invested in head light upgrades it sure made a big difference.  It was from "these headlights kinda suck" to where I'm totally happy with them now.  

[bsneon98]

this is awesome. I hate myself for being late to this!

 

Love what you are doing and cant wait to see what you come up with! 

 

PS. i loled hard at the cat sitting on your valve cover.