I recently purchased and had a lift installed on my 2-door automatic JK. I went with this lift because I thought no drive line mods would be required. Hence it would be relatively inexpensive compared to what I really wanted to do in a few years. Well, it turns out the lift does require drive line mods.

My question then is should I:

1) spend $750 on a new front drive shaft and adjustable upper control arms to "patch" the current lift. Realizing that I will need to watch the rear drive shaft for problems after every run and may need to sink another $750 to fix the rear drive shaft and pinion angle at any moment. I would probably throw all this out in 2 years time to go with my long term lift plan--unless I found it to work really well.

2) write the current lift off as a very expensive mistake and get a RE, TF, or Clayton 3-3.5" short arm lift with new drive shafts now.

The front drive shaft has to be replaced regardless of what I do and it may require upper adjustable control arms to set the pinion angle correctly. I'm also not sure if I could move a new front drive shaft from this lift setup to a new lift setup down the road.

And yes, I should have just gone full-tilt at the get go, but I was trying to save money now and get something that would still fulfill my needs for the time being.

Thanks for any advice.

-Glen

 

Give us some background. What lift did you get that you are having troubles with?

 

i say this all the time to people..

what lift do you have? you might be able to just buy arms and upgrade to where you need to be

 

Mopar 2" with coil springs and Bilstein 5100s. First run out, rip front DS boot on tranny pan.

By the way, the $750 is for an aftermarket DS and adj arms.

 

yeah, you cant do much with a 2" lift spring.

You'll definetly need adjustable control arms, for the new shaft.

So you might well buy a lift with adjustable arms

 

I thought the Mopar 2" was a spacer lift???

 

Nope. See my pictures here: http://ww w.glenakins.com/MoparLift/
(Hope direct link is OK. I'm not a sponsor, but I'm also not selling anything.)

 

I am really surprised you had issues. I have the TF 2.5" coil lift on my 2dr (gave me 3.25" total lift) and am still running my stock shafts. 4k miles and no issues so far, and i abuse the crap outa it.

 

I'm really surprised too. This is my first lift so I didn't measure the right spots, but the front bumper came up 4" and the rear bumper came up 1/2". I can fit my entire head in both the front and rear wheel wells.

 

With most lifts you can't run your tranny skid unless you trim it to make sure it won't hit. If you read the directions of most lifts they have you discard this skid, especially with as much droop as you have. Even with an aftermarket shaft you will probably have a clearance issue, and need to trim the skid.