yeah, thats a ride, no question, those are all things that
CAN give you death wobble, they saw a payday walk in the door and decided to fix it by fixing it all.
You own a Jeep, you should have some basic tools and a Harbor Freight within a hundred miles or so, so lets get you started down the road to mechanics shop independance, first let me ask, did you install the lift yourself? If so, then you have a fairly good idea whats under your Jeep, if not, time to go have a look, take some cardboard and lay under there and just look around and see how much you can identify and know what its purpose is. then refer to a couple diagrams, one from 4x4xplor -
Now, jack up one side of your front axle, just enough to have the tire a few inches off the ground, make sure the jack is under the axle itself, now using either a prybar or just your hands try to 'wiggle' the tire not rotate, but in and out, there should be a tiny bit of play caused by the steering giving a little, but that will be at the sides, push in and pull out at the top and bottom, or put the prybar under the tire and lift up, if it has and play up and down, then yes, you most likely have a ball-joint or unit bearing that will need replaced, if not, look closely at your ball joints for signs of fresh grease or no grease at all, concider how many miles are on it and how hard your wheeling.
Next lets have a look at your track bar, grab it up by the frame side mount and see if you can wiggle it at all, you shouldnt be able to, and if it moves you will immediatly be able to tell why (make sure you have a rag or two with you, your going to get greasy here), next we'll look at the axle side of the track bar, this side can only move side to side if it has a bad bushing, you wont be able to do it by hand, but you should be able to see small clean areas of metal if its been moving.
Ok, moving along, you can do this same thing at your tie-rod ends, wiggle them and look for movement, you can even
gently use the prybar to look for movement, this is the most likely place your going to find problems because you have a 4" lift and 33"s, its time to upgrade that steering if you want to be safe and see lots of life out of your Jeep, including your own, there are a lot of options and a lot of price range in steering, and a ton of wildly differing opinions, you go with ORO U-turn for about $600, Currie for about $450, Crown for about $200 or the ZJ upgrade cheaper than that, we'll talk more about that in a minute.
Alignment is a waste of money to have someone else do it, all that can be adjusted is toe-in, if you can read a tape measure and have some wrenches, you can do this yourself and save about $100, I'll show you where to find out how in just a min.
Balance is something that affects death wobble more than any other single contributer if you coalesc the threads on all the forums, make sure you take it to a shop that prefferably does only tires and tell them you want them "road-force balanced", and dont let them up-sell you that you need brakes you need ball-joints, you need this, that or anything else, just tell them to do the balancing and if you like, rotate the tires (this is a good idea if you do a lot of street driving for even wear).
By now you should know exactly what problems you do or dont have, and you havent spent $1100, so lets see how much your going to spend to fix your problems, when you decide what your going to need, you have about a thousand options for buying your parts, a lot of people go to
rockauto.com for the prices, they are the lowest you'll find for quality parts, however, if they give you a wrong part you cant just drive it to the store and exchange it, so its up to you.
Right now your thinking 'but I dont know how to do any of this stuff to my Jeep even if I had the tools', ok, lets fix that. Your going to find as you do more and more mechanical jobs yourself that it has been fairly easy all along, usualy any job ends up with a spot where it isnt going to plan and you have to work out how to the part loose, or out or need a special tool (most of these can be 'borrowed' from your parts store), your going to find out that the job they wanted $1100 for was, perhaps worth it to them, but you'll be glad you didnt pay it when you see how straight forward a job it is, by far the hardest thing on that list is ball joints, the rest is a 30 min job each, if that.
Mechanical know how. There is a wealth of information out here on how to fix absolutely everything you will ever need to (and a fair number of things you wont) when it comes to your Jeep, two web-sites I'm going to put up links for, they will both require some reading and some time clicking and looking through, but you will learn more than you thought possible in a very very short time, the first is
Stu Olsen's site, his site will show you with great pics and write-ups how to do anything you could need to, its a truly amazing site and one of the best Jeep knowledge bases you'll find, without Stu we would all be doing things the hard way more often, the second is the
TJ Tech Boot Camp list, this has everything you need to know about servicing and taking care of your Jeep, all fluid capacities and types, lots of mechanical write-ups, and both sites have more than one write-up about how exactly to do your alignment, when you see how simple that is you wont have anything nice to say to that shop.
Stu Olsen's site
TJ Tech Boot Camp
So, your on your way to saving a pile of cash, when you get done you take what it cost you for parts, subtract that from $1168 (and they are usualy low on their own estimates) and decide what your going to buy for your Jeep to celebrate.
A last word of caution, once you start working on your Jeep, its going to give you this huge feeling of accomplishment, and that feeling is going to get addictive quickly, soon you'll be doing things you never dreamed you could and loving every minute of it (once its done of course lol), its a wonderful feeling to know you can handle anything that goes wrong, and we in the forums will always be here to help.
Have fun and enjoy.
