Tj 8.8 Swap

champbing02 said:

Alright, so I got a wild hair and thought that I could swap in an 8.8 for my dana 35 in the rear. I am about halfway through my project and I am having some concerns.
1. When I weld up all the mounts and mock it all up if my measurements are off a little bit whats going to happen?
2. If it is going to cause problems my solution was to do adjustable control arms.
3. If I do adjustable control arms am I going to have to do uppers and lowers or just lowers?
4. Also if I did control arms I was going to build them myself that way I would have the rod ends to reuse if I ever went to long arms.
Any and all help is appreciated!!

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If your mounts are off by too much, your rear end won't track straight and you could experience vibration from having an incorrect pinion angle. Your best would be to get the brackets tacked into place and them mount everything up and double-triple measure all of your brackets and angles and verify that everything is okay and there are no interference issues when either side of the axle travels up/down. Something else to think about/take into consideration, the 8.8 is a little narrower than the D35. I would suggest using a digital angle finder to help get everything dialed in. I only had adjustable uppers and I was able to get everything to work out pretty well.

I know that when I did my 8.8 swap a while back, I had issues with the diff cover coming in contact with the skid plate for the fuel tank, but it was an after market side plate and a pretty thick diff cover. This is where taking the time to mount in the jeep before welding everything solid really would have helped.

I had them before to help correct my pinion angle with the lift kit.

champbing02 said:

When you did your swap what did you do for wheel spacers to correct this?

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Nothing. I believe the width difference was 5/8", so about about 5/16" on each side. I never noticed any issues.