Morten's Jeep XJ page: OME 2" lif-kit

Old Man Emu 2" lift-kit

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In September 2001 I finally got my '94 XJ lifted with a OME 2" lift-kit. This is not meant as a technical howto, just a light summary of what I did and what my impressions were before and afterwards.

The first impression I got when I received the parts for the lift-kit was how much better everything looked. The shock absorbers were bigger and looked more "sporty", the front coil springs were bigger, and the rear leaf springs looked much more rugged and, again, bigger. The old parts were rusted and worn, so it was a good thing we got them replaced. The old shock absorbers looked really bad, as you can see from the pictures below.

The kit I got contained the following items:

Front coil springs
Rear leaf springs
Shock absorbers for front and back
Energy Suspension polyurethane leaf spring bushings
U-bolts

The new leaf spring bushings and u-bolts are probably not standard parts for the lift-kit, but the supplier I bought them from included them for me. Anyway, these are parts you should replace anyway, imho.

Old and new shock absorbers

Old and new leaf springs

The installation went fairly smooth, especially since I had a lot of help from two friends who were much more experienced than I am. But there were two things which caused us some problems. In order to remove the bolt which held the leaf springs in the back we had to remove the trailer hitch and the rear bumper. Our second problem was a rusted screw which held the old right rear shock absorber. After being a bit too rough it broke off, which meant we had to do a lot of extra work in order to get the other half of the broken screw removed. If it hadn't been for these two things the installation wouldn't have taken more than an evening.

Before and after

After

When everything was done I ofcourse had to take it for a test run. The first thing I noticed was how much stiffer and harder the new suspension was. This was something I had expected, since I had ordered the heavy duty stiffer version of the lift kit. The advantages of this is that the new leaf springs can take much more weight, and the car behaves better in high-speed cornering, and on the road in general, something which I really got to test on my 9 hour drive home over Norwegian mountain roads :)

So far I've only had one opportunity to test it offroad, but the test went very well. The increased ground clearance given by the lift-kit and larger tires really do make a lot of difference offroad, but who would think anything else?

With this 2" lift my new Yokohama Geolandar A/T+II 245/70-R16 tires fit nicely. When driving offroad there weren't any rubbing at all. To me this lift and tire combination is perfect.

After

After, testing offroad

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Old Man Emu 2" lift-kit

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