took my CJ for its first run today down off 234 in Dale City, VA. It was awesome!! Everything was going great but it was real sloppy, i mean baby sh*t colored clay mud. even brand new 42" TSL's werent shedding it with out really flogging the motor. Any ways all was going great til....... my buddy tells me to romp it from a stand still so i did and there was loud bang!!! my first thought was drive shaft Ujoint. Mark thought it was a differential problem. the steam from under the hood quickly confirmed we were both wrong. apparently when i cogged it the frame twisted and caused the top of the radiator to unite with the flex fan. from about 11 o'clock to 1 o'clock on an imaginary clock on the radiator are shaved down about 1 (of the 4) core. fortunetly we were not far from the trailor and i could drive it out but now i need to fix the damage.

1. its a mepco 4 core (ie. expensive) radiator. is it trashed or can they be recored (?)

2. i need a new flex fan or is now the time to go to an electric fan?

3. whats the right way to prevent this from happenening again under other then ignorant circumstances (ie. twisted up on rocks or off camber situations)? use a smaller fan spacer? add some sort of frame cross member? i dont think i can move the radiator futher forward.

thanks for any suggestions

Sounds to me as if the radiator is toast. Not certian though but a good Radiator shop could tell you for sure. Some of these things are fixable others are not.

Sounds to me like it is time to get an electric fan. you can then build a shroud to increase your cooling and not have to worry about this happening again.

You also might want to look at your motor mounts. Without seeing it sounds like the engine moved an awful lot. A inch or two is totally normal but it sounds like yours moved 6 or more.

That is one thing I have to say about my 1/4 inch Matkins frame.
It doesn't twist like the stock frame did and bind clutch bell crank. The electric fan would be a work.

When you put the rig back together , did you put the rods that go from the firewall to the grill back on? Just thinking ( man that hurt ) that the grill flexed into the fan.

Sounds like you got alot of power if it can twist things up that much! One thing you should do to help prevent this and to help save your motor mounts is run a chain from your driver side cylinder head down to the frame, and make sure its tight!

How much room do you have between the fan and radiator? Do you have a shroud? if you have a shroud you don't need the fan to be extremly close to the radiator (look under the hood of a 4cyl wrangler :eek: )