I will do my best to list and provide links to all parts used in the build.
Simple Beginnings
Like all Jeep Cherokees, Hyperion started out as a small little guy. me and my wife bought it so that she could use it as a mail vehicle. Over the course of its time at the post office it got a little 3 inch Zone Offroad lift, a Smittybilt tire carrier bumper, and a EAG front bumper.
In its Stock form I went ahead and added some quality-of-life upgrades. I started with the Antirock sway bar. Yes, these are expensive compared to pretty much all other options of adding disconnects but it is just so worth it! 10/10 do recommend.
Time For an Upgrade
After a rather unsuccessful trip to Maggie Valley and to the hurricane creek trail, it was time for an upgrade.
Yes, some more lift on the stock axles would have been fine, but if I am going to do something I am going all the way!
With the stock axles being a dana 30 and the Chrysler 8.25 I refused to spend any money on them. the components were so worn out that the spider gears in the differential would jiggle and bind up at times. this would cause either the front tires to push instead of turning on wet roads, or as discovered out on the trails, if the wheels lifted, I would lose traction until the gears bound up giving a jarring and momentary "locker" of sorts.
After finding a matching pair of Ford axles it was time to start getting them ready. Me and my dad spend about 6 months working on and off on the to prep the axles.
First step was to remove all the Ford related mounts, this has to happen no matter what truss you are going to use. I was fortunate enough to get a good deal from Barnes 4wd for a xj/yj/tj/zj axle swap truss and some spring perches for the rear axle. this truss made it pretty easy to get the axle ready to bolt on, but if I were to do it again, I would use the Artec Swap truss instead. This is due to the fact that I had also chose to put on a weld on high-steer setup, and they made it difficult to get the correct steering geometry with the Barnes track bar location. It is intended to use the ford factory steering setup.
Due to the high steer knuckles we had to mix and match parts to get the track bar in line. I did some searching and found the Artec over axle mount for the track bar, which did give us the adjustability needed to fix the steering.
Side note, do not use the 08+ high steer brackets from Barnes, they give the absolute worst steering geometry effectively halving steering angle.
Finally Getting Gears
I plan to run 40" tires in the future, so I chose a 5.13 ratio based on the ratio chart for a 4.0 inline with the AW4 transmission.
I bought my gears from Revolution Gear and Axle back at the 2023 Smoky Mountain Jeep Invasion.
Re-gearing the sterling axle while adding a locker was quite a pain.
My gears were labeled as being made for a Sterling 10.25 "long nose" which might have contributed to having to add over 0.150" of shim to the depth of the pinion to get it to mesh properly on the ring gear.
Not knowing this made it quite annoying to get the mesh right. It took three of us pretty much all day just to do the back axle. Made even more fun by having added a later 2011+ E-locker to the rear which made the center well in excess of 40 lbs.
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