Help with my 94 XLT

[Blake D]

I have a 1994 XLT. I have a few questions and concerns.
First what is limited slip? and what difference does it make to have a 3.73 gears or 4.01 or whatever I might have? I tried to look on the door panel it said 41 but I'm not sure if that is correct because the vehicle was previously salvage and has had paint job. The reason I question it is I seem to have the extra cooler in front of the radiator, clicking sound from rear taillight, and wiring harness for trailor lights (towing package sounds like?)

Second I dont have a roof rack or anything on the roof and would like to get a safari rack up there but I'm not sure on what is involved and if its worth it (want the extra room to carry stuff on trips and to put lights on)

Third I had my belt changed about 2 months ago at Sears and I am hearing a squeaking noise. Thought it needed tightened then found out about auto tensioner. Took it back to Sears and they sprayed some stuff on it. Didn't work. Not just moisture either, it gets better once I drive but still makes noise.

Lastly the front, I want to say transfer case , or mabye front differential housing, has stuff occasionally dripping from it. Looks kinda like dirty baby oil with same texture, doesn't leak much just sometimes. Break fliud and other fluids have been checked and seem fine (Power steering mabye a litle high)

Putting BFG TAKO's 31x10.5x 15 on Monday

Sorry if this is too long just couldn't find any answers directly to these questions and this is my first post.

Thanks for the help guys, If I can figure out how my vehicle is set up and fix its problems I am going to make it a little more off road worthy.

Thanks Blake

 

[TDG]

Blake, Welcome to the site. I'm not very good at explaining things in words(notice the low post count and I have been a member for a whole month) but I'll give it a shot, I'm sure others will correct me in the areas that I get wrong.

1) Limited slip basically uses various mechanisms to allow normal differential action when going around turns. When a wheel slips, they allow more torque to be transferred to the non-slipping wheel. That's about as close as I can get in layman terms, I know how this stuff works just not good at putting it in writing.

2) The gear ratio is a comparison of the number of gear teeth on the ring gear and the pinion gear. If you take the number of teeth on the on the ring gear( lets say 37) and divide it by the number on the pinion gear (lets say 9) you come up with the axle ratio. (4.11) You could also say that it is the number of times the driveshaft must turn to make the wheels turn once, so in the case of a 4.11 the drive shaft must turn 4.11 times to make the wheel turn once.

3) According to the doorpanel on your truck you have a 3.27 conventional, in other words no limited slip. If you aren't sure of the accuracy of the doorpanel there are a few threads on this site that will tell you how to find out. Also most of the shop manuals have some sort of procedure.

4) The extra cooler in front of the radiator is the transmission cooler. To the best of my limited knowledge they were standard on all pre 95s.

5) That annoying clicking sound from the rear taillight is a trailer lighting isolation device, probably nothing more than a bunch of relays. This combined with the wiring harness means that you do have the tow package.

That is about all I can help you with, I don't know much about the safari racks or front differentials, squeaking sounds coming from the belt area are always a pain the butt to rid of. Hope some of this helps.

 

[Stephen S]

TDG, I'd say that you did an excellent job of explaining the items you discussed. Right on description of the LS, the gear ratio, and the tow package. The only thing is that I don't think that the aux tranny cooler was standard on all pre 95s. That cooler is also part of the towing package.

 

[Dannyboy]

Safari racks are cool unless you are my roommate.
He had a 31X10.5 mounted to the roof of his cherokee and some dude pulled out infront of him in an F150.
BAM
Lets say that the rack went for about a 50 foot flight, thank God no one was in front of that thing. As for a towing pack, I don't know if a tranny cooler is stock, I had one installed and I had the trailer light hookup, when I pull out the harness, the clicking noise when you step on the brakes stops. I am still trying to figure out If I have the towing package, I'm guessing I do.

 

[Blake D]

Thanks for the info. I really appriciate it!
What difference does it make to have the 4.1 gearing though, I've seen many posts about changing to them?

Forgot to say that the belt never squeaked BEFORE it got replaced just after. Could the auto tens need tightened, or could the spring or whatever it is that makes it auto tighten need some WD40?

I still have that "baby oil" dripping , nothing seems low still, but it probably drips only 1 1/2 teaspoon overnight. Doesnet seem like much I know but I just don't want to walk out tomarrow and see it leaked a QUART or something and have it towed from the garage

On another side note my muffler (not the two cats) is making a puffing/wistling noise. Found a hole the size of a pea and the wistling stoped when I put my finger over it. Yeah, it was hot but I'm a real man........
.....
I wore heavy leather gloves but seriously is this something that will hurt my engine? and what is a good replacement for on road/offroad that wont force me get a refund on my honeymoon this June. Just kidding You think she'll let me even get my ko's if I didn't have it almost totally paid off!

 

[TDG]

Stephen S,
I'm not really sure what the deal is with the tranny cooler or where and when it was offered. I think that every pre95 I've looked at has it and I have been under the hood of a few 95+s with autos that didn't have it. At least we established that it is the transmission cooler, over the years of working on Explorers I've heard it referred to for just about everything else.

Blake D,
Ok last things first, the hole in the muffler is pretty common and is generally caused when people take very short trips and don't let everything fully warm up. I'm sure you have noticed the water vapor and sometimes water dripping from your tailpipe after first starting the vehicle this is perfectly normal. The idea is that the vehicle will be driven for a long enough distance to allow this water to "burn off" more like "steam off" however if you take many short trips the exhaust system does not get hot enough to "burn or steam off" the water and puddles up in the muffler and since heat is a very good friend of rust pretty soon you got a hole. Some aftermarket mufflers have a 1/16 hole in them to allow the water to drip out. Since you have a hole in yours this might be a great time to upgrade to one of the many cat-back exhaust systems available or have a local muffler shop fab you a custom cat-back. Not going to go into exhausts here because there are way too many threads out there on the subject. No it won't hurt your engine.

Moving on to the oil dripping problem, are you able to tell if it is dripping directly from the differential housing or is something above the differential housing dripping on to it running down it? Also have you checked the axle fluid level recently?

As far as the belt squeaking noise goes, first of all it can be a little hard to tighten an auto tensioner, if its not auto tensioning replace it. There is a lot of tension on the auto tensioner it really shouldn't need WD40 unless it is squeaking when it moves. Second of all, does the noise occur when the engine is just idling or only when making turns, using the AC or other things that would be demanding to the belt? Do you have the original belt that you could put back on? There is the rare chance that the belts could be of slightly different compounds and the new one just happens to squeak. (Going way out on limb with that one, never had any squeaking belts) I'm not an advocate of spraying stuff on belts to make noise go away, I don't spray my belts with stuff and you shouldn't have to, however if spraying does make the noise go away then you might have to dig up another belt.

I'm having a hard time finding the right words for the first question (reason I started with the last one) but in layman terms uping your gear ratio will help prevent the engine from bogging down. If you have already gone to 31's and you do have a 3.27 ratio you are probably wondering where all the power went and why it seems to shift more. Someone else of more techinical writing skill will have to explain this one or just do a search and you should get plenty of threads about regearing.

Good Luck,
Tim

 

[Ray Lobato]

Hi Blake, and Welcome to the site.
The reason the many of us change gears when we go to larger tires is we want to keep in the same RPM range that we had when we were stock. Putting larger tires on will decrease the RPM of the engine at the same speed that you would have with stock tires. Say you were at 2200 RPM's at 65mph with 29" stock tires. When you changed to 31" tires, now you will be running at 2000RPM's at 65 mph. If you had 3.73 gears and you changed to 4.10 gears, you would be back to 2200 RPM's with the 31" tires. The RPM figures are not true values, but just examples, so don't use the values, but this should give you the reason why we change our gears. Normally if you are just going up 1 tire size, it shouldn't make too much differance, but going up more than that, you will loose too much of your low end torque, and end up shifting into OD only when you going 80mph, because the RPM range is too low for the truck to shift into OD. I had to run around with 33" tire and 3.55 gears for a while until my ARB locker came in and I'll tell you that my milage sucked bad and it was gutless going up hills, not to mention it would keep shifting out of OD so much that I just turned it off. I now run 4.10's with 33's and it's OK, but I should have put 4.27's in and that would have put me back at the same RPM's that I had in stock mode.
As far as you putting on a Safari rack, it is still possible , but you will have to pull the fatory rack of a junker and add it to your truck. This really isn't a hard job, but you will have to drill holes in the roof, and you must make sure that you silicon the holes to keep it water tight. Hope this helps.

About the squeaking, make sure that the belt tensioner is doing it's job. They can and do go bad.

 

[Blake D]

Thanks for the help ! I got the 31's and love em, a little trimming will need to be done so there will be no rubbing when turning.
The gear ratio question... wouldn't it be better for your engine to run at a lower rpm when you are going faster? Less wear and tear? It sounds kind of odd because bigger tires are heavier and the engine should have to work more? Thanks for the info though, this place ir really neat!

The "baby oil" I think is gear oil, had one of my friends look at it. He said since the leak is so small I could probably pull the plug on the differential, or whatever you call it, and stick my finger in to see where the level is, then when it is low put some gear oil in and close it up again. Then if it gets real bad go get it fixed, which will cause BIG $$$ cause you have to pull the axle apart to fix the seal? I don't know what this would cost but he said it might be cheaper to get one from a junk yard? Any help from this would be good, the leak seems to come from the seal where th axel from the passenger side enters the housing, moist there and eventually accumulates enough to drip... still real slow though.

You guys are great! Thanks for the help!

 

[Dannyboy]

Check out Andre Hyrn or "DRE" 's profile he is selling a bunch of stuff and one of the items is a front diffy, I brake an axle and they said it wouldn't be much more than an hour for install so I couldn't imagine a seal would take a lot longer.
As far as gears I read an article that spelled it out well.
Take your desired tire size and multiply it by .12 forxample: 31x10.5 ___ 31*.12= 3.72 so a 3.73 would be a good gear. Dre has a set of these for sale cheap right now. Check out his thread

 

[TDG]

Blake, the question regarding gear ratios and engine speed kind of opens up a new can of worms. Ray did an excellent job of putting into words what I was thinking and dannyboys formula looks good. However if you are going to put down the bucks to regear you might want to think about future growth, in other words are you going to leave those 31's on there forever or is the bigger is better bug going to bite and you have to move up in tire size, so if you do decided to regear you might want to go into the 4.11/4.56 area and save yourself a few bucks down the road.

Lower engine speed versus highway speed can be a both a blessing and curse depending on how you drive the vehicle. My 92 has the 3.08 ratio in it for the simple reason that that’s what it had when I bought it used. The 3.08 is never going to win me any street light drags (Not that I would be driving an explorer if that’s what I wanted to do) but with the stock size tires that I run I can scream down the California freeway system in OD at 85+ with the tach comfortably below 2500 rpm. However it requires a little bit thinking ahead when I need to pass or speed up cause it doesn’t have any power in OD. Like Ray was saying I'm in that situation that when below 75 I have to take it out of OD to avoid lugging the motor down too much. The blessings are that with the stock size tires I can keep the RPM down and still get a good top end, also when I can resist the urge to bury the throttle all the way to second gear at 70mph (to get away from all of the idiots) I get great economy and since this my daily driver that is fairly important. The curses of it are that I have to think about selecting the right gear to avoid lugging the engine too much.

It is true that running engines slower is generally better for them, however there is too low. I have often heard this referred too as lugging the engine down. Things that can happen when you lug an engine down, combustion chamber temperatures rise creating hotspots in the cylinder head and piston, these hotspots generally cause preignition, detonation or better known as pinging. The ford manual will tell you that a LIGHT amount of pinging is acceptable which is true, however a heavy amount of pinging for a long period of time can do all kinds of fun and expensive stuff like blowing holes through pistons, flattening ring lands on the pistons and a few other things. Another problem with lugging the engine down is that it beats the pistons, rods, rod bearings, and bearing caps unnecessarily and when rebuild time comes you might a few less reusable parts.

Now keep in mind that I am not saying that you or anyone else out there who is running a low gear ratio (or larger tires) is destroying their engine. I have 257,000 miles on my engine, granted its not in very good shape but it still gets me around 100% day in and day out. (And yes it is getting replaced soon) However I am saying that since you are now running larger and heavier tires that you might need to choose your gears more than you had to, if the tach is stuck at 1500 and the engine is sputtering then do yourself and your engine a favor and drop down a gear. (Yeah I know common sense stuff)

And last of all to help avoid another "My A4LD is a POS" thread, if you find the transmission "gear hunting" in other words going up and down between gears shift it into the lowest gear that it prefers, generally this means nothing more than taking it out of OD on a hill, but every shift you keep that transmission from doing is one more shift you will probably get on down the road.

Tim

Sorry about being so wordy, but insomnia sucks.