After blowing out my stock D30 playing in the Rock Garden in Farmington, NM with Danny Parsons one afternoon, I figured it was time to upgrade my axle. Of course, it blew the day after he and I spent some time adjusting the suspension connections and replacing my bent tie rod! Right after I got my heep onto the trailer, Danny suggested we go look around a near by junkyard that he knew of having good Jeep stuff. We headed off in the 100° heat and found over a dozen scrapped or wrecked XJ's. In the mix were 2 mid 90's 2 door, 4 cylinder XJ's that were completely intact. These were former news channel vehicles that must have served out their time and were sold to the wrecking yard. Now, I know that a mid 95 to mid 99 XJ's had D30's that came from the factory with Dana 44 spec 297X/760X sized u-joints and we did manage to find a '98. However, my goal was to have this be as inexpensive a swap as possible and knew that even though the D30 I was looking at came with 260X size u-joints, it also had factory 4.10 gears, thus being basically a bolt on upgrade as opposed to one needing a gear swap. Since the High Pinion design is a lot stronger simply due to the physics of the reverse rotation of the ring and pinion, I opted for the '95 axle. After bartering with the counter monkeys and paying $250, the axle was put into my truck's bed.

After getting it home, I spent a day degreasing and cleaning the axle as well as taking off all of the torched off factory stuff.

Here is the cleaned and painted HP D30 ready for install. My plan was to utilize the stock wheels and tires I had laying around to roll out the old axle and roll in the new one. My game plan was to pull the brake discs and calipers without opening up the brake lines (so I wouldn't have to bleed them) and to drop the bad axle and roll it away, and roll the new one in it's place and hook everything back up. Good plan.


Having my OBA system allows me to run an impact wrench which was a big help getting the factory nuts & bolts off. The blue hose is my air hose plugged into the front of my heep. With a 2½ gallon air tank, I didn't have to start up the Jeep too many times.


My thoughts were that the tie rod and drag link on the replacement axle were still within acceptable alignment since the vehicle was parked at the junk yard and still had the wheels and tires on it when I bought it. I was lucky. This would have been a perfect time to install some shock bar pin eliminators if I had only thought about it. Notice, not a drop of fluid anywhere!


Here you can see one of the calipers on the right side of the picture. I hooked a c-clamp through it and hung it off of the frame during the swap. As for the perfect plan, we got hung up with the passenger side coil spring. After reconnecting all of the control arms, the axle just wouldn't droop enough to pop the spring in without running to Auto Zone to borrow a set of strut/spring compressors. What a pain in the ass! I swear I am buying a set of those stupid compressors as many trips to town I've had to make to fetch some!


Here is the finished install in it's high pinion gloryness! I tested it over Black Bear the following weekend, driving it to and from the trail about an hour and a half each way without any problems! Notice that both of the extended bump stops fell out of the cups and are sitting on the bottom coil spring pads, doh!


Next on the list will be to separate the busted ring gear from the old carrier so I can remove the Lock-Right from it and install it into the new axle. In looking at the old carrier, it appears that when the locker was installed, the shims were not put back right. This resulted in a few of the shims wearing down to nothing causing too much backlash. I think that if the shims were put back in the exact order they were in when they were pulled out, I probably wouldn't have had the ring teeth break. $250 lesson learned.  Oh well, at least I can say I upgraded my front axle for about the same cost as a set of replacement gears. And, I have a set of replacement shafts, brake discs, calipers, tie rod, and drag link as trail spares now! Yahoo!