You wheel a JKU. By default you also clearly have access to several credit cards and lines of credit at every single online parts supplier that sells widgets for them. You are obligated to buy every single such widget and bolt it on (JK guys can’t weld, sorry), and proceed directly to the nearest patch of dirt and immediately break your front axle. These are the internet rules for JK’s, it’s all pretty clearly spelled out somewhere around page 4 of the manual if memory serves…
Internet reality being what it is, I’m also one of the apparent minority who has successfully piloted a couple different JK’s over a dirt road or two with no signs of failure, other than a catastrophic ring and pinion failure that I cannot even try to blame on anything but the poor connection between the throttle pedal and the driver’s seat
. Is the JK front axle the TJ-esque Dana 35 ticking time bomb of the 2007-2018 JK Wrangler era? Perhaps, but let’s take a few things into consideration here:
• The JK platform, and particularly the JKU, ushered in an entirely new group of wheelers to our little world. The vast, and I do mean vast, majority of these fine people had never experienced any type of wheeling before, and the learning curve associated with that is bound to be full of broken parts and dreams
• As all those “newbies” were learning to drive, some maybe even ignoring the sage advice offered by the leaf spring driving duffers, the internet was exploding with bulletin boards and forums and social media outlets just begging to be filled with tales of woe. No one likes to sit around reading about how well other’s junk works – we want carnage!! So most of what we hear about is the bad news
• In referencing the TJ Dana 35, we need to look back at just how terrible that thing really is. Or is it? Sure we probably all know somebody that knows a guy that has a sister-in-law who’s third cousin’s neighbor snapped an axle shaft and drove home with a Hi-Lift jack handle strapped to the frame to keep the tire/axle assembly from walking sideways out from under the Jeep. But again, in purely statistical terms, it’s an incredibly low rate of failure. Shoot I know a couple people that wheel harder on Dana 35’s than most people wheel period (JAFO is the anomaly in this scenario, he just breaks $h!t), and I can’t recall any of them ever being a trail plug
The bottom line is, from my perspective, if you have your wits about you and fully understand and respect your machine, you will likely get years and years of dutiful service from it. But if you drive it like you stole it, you should expect some collateral damage without taking the proper steps to mitigate that sort of abuse. The simple act of installing larger tires and running harder trails doesn’t default you to a disastrous scenario, but it does require you to understand and respect what you’ve done and where you are. And the last time we shared dirt road and beef jerky, you had that pretty well at hand…
Now, all that said, I do tend to err on the side of caution. Things happen. And knowing that you are going to be putting additional strain on a “known weak link” is, effectively, asking for trouble. With that in mind, I would have to suggest taking a pretty serious look at a truss system. I’m not overly convinced that knuckle gussets are necessary, but I have seen enough evidence of axle housing failures that I’d sleep better with something added there for the sake of peace of mind. Couple that with your specific need for a raised trac bar mount in order to utilize some parts you’ve already got on hand, and something like the Artec truss kit just makes all around good sense in my opinion.
Now whip out that JK edition Member’s Only VISA and get more widgets coming. The Rubicon awaits
