One more question... Axles gears

Yup, just giving someone a hard time. Good-naturedly. Not everyone needs 90:1 for their wheeling. One of my trail partners has a Rubicon with the Rubi Crawler, he's at 125:1

 

Agreed. It is possible to have too much crawl ratio. If you wheel in sand or mud you still need to be able to whip up some wheel speed.

 

Precisely, just depends on the type of terrain you have to play on.

 

My friend is a good example. He geared his 4 cyl., 5speed YJ down with 4.88's, 31 inch tires. There have been a couple times when he has had to reverse up sandy hills out on the beach here. Hi range does not have enough oomph, low range seems to be too slow and only wants to dig down. My CJ-5 with 258, T176, d300, 4.10s and 32 x ll.50's does the same in 4 hi reverse no problem.

 

my thoughts exactly! here in Ohio I don't need super low gears. most of the wheeling is old haul roads, trails, and some mud.

 

I'd recommend being careful in reverse with a serious load. The reverse gears are the smallest ones in the transmission and are not designed for heavy duty use in these types of transmissions....

 

You know you are not limited to only using 1st gear in low range. Tell your friend to see if he can find a good gear in Lo for the sand besides 1st. There's got to be one that comes close to rev. in high range.

 

Yup. definitely something to keep in mind. I've seen high mileage transmissions with gears chewed up driven by guys who don't allow the transmission to slow down before shifting into reverse. That makes it even worse.




Edit: This is in response to nikmil's post #46. Meant to reply with quote.

 

We're talking about reverse gear in this case.

 

Yup, what I meant was there has to be a ratio in the tranny when in Lo range that is close to reverse gear that could be used instead of reverse. Unless rev, high range is lower than 1st gear lo range. Seems like if 1st gear llow is too low, second gear would do just fine. But, I can't say I've ever driven in sand. Done a lot of snow wheeling though and I'm guessing there are a lot of similarities.

 

I know what you mean. Softeness of sand out here varies a lot with temperature. During the summer months it can get pretty soft and wind blown dry drift sand is the worse. He doesn't seem to have much of a problem with forward gears. As you say, he would have a selection of ratios. What really compounded his problems was that in an attempt to get more power out of the 2.5 four, he changed the cam and in doing so, he lost some low end. I told him he'd never be happy with a four cylinder.

 

I never was. Sorry L and F head guys.