How An Off-Roader Replaced His Jeep’s Broken Suspension With Ratchet Straps, Then Drove 150 Miles Home

Utah native Tyler Fenn was on one of his favorite off-road trails in Moab, Utah when he heard a loud clunking noise coming from the bottom of his 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee ZJ. “I immediately knew…something had broken,” he told me.” Upon inspection, he found that part of his axle housing had ripped right off, leaving him with no way to drive the 3.5 hours back home…unless he came up with a fix.

To understand exactly what happened with Tyler’s Jeep, and how wild his fix was, it helps to know how a five-link coil-sprung suspension works. The Jeep Grand Cherokee ZJ was actually a pioneer in off-road suspension design, offering the very first dual-five-link coil-sprung solid axle setup ever — a design that was then adopted by every Wrangler to this day.

Why The Track Bar Is A Critical Part Of A Jeep’s Suspension

I wrote a whole story about the ZJ’s suspension here, but here’s a bit of a primer:

The ZJ was a huge deal back in its day. It took a formula pioneered (pun intended) by the Jeep Cherokee XJ — pairing a unibody with two solid axles — and built upon it. It kept the XJ’s track width, extended the wheelbase a bit, fixed the XJ’s cooling system inadequacies, and took the XJ’s Quadra-Link front suspension and adapted it to the rear, creating the Quadra Coil. The Quadra Coil went on to become the standard for off-road rear suspension designs, with everything from the Land Cruiser, Bronco, 4Runner, FJ Cruiser and so many others adopting the excellent suspension layout consisting of a track bar, two upper control arms, two lower control arms, coil springs and shocks (some separate, some coilovers).

In fact, the Jeep ZJ would go on to be the only Jeep ever to pair a relatively lightweight and stiff unibody design with a fully coil-sprung five-link suspension front and rear. (Some call it a four-link, ignoring the track bar, which is also called a panhard rod). Here you can see the ZJ’s excellent suspension setup, courtesy of suspension seller Super Pro:

You’ll notice two lower control arms (or trailing arms), which are there to place the axle in the longitudinal direction (i.e. fore-aft), you’ll notice a track bar/panhard bar that places the axle in the lateral direction, and you’ll see two upper control arms/trailing arms to prevent axle wrap (i.e. the axle twisting) when braking or acceleration.

Here you can see that this is essentially the front suspension, but flipped around:

This sensational suspension design — which offers a ratio of comfort:suspension articulation never before seen in a dual solid axle vehicle — would never be seen again on a unibody Jeep, though the ZJ’s successor, the WJ, offered a strange variant of the design.

It should be clear based on that article, and on those photos, why a track bar (panhard bar) — which connects the axle to the frame — is so important. It’s what keeps each axle from wanting to move side to side when taking turns. The fore-aft oriented control arms only keep the axle from moving fore-aft/twisting, making the track bar’s job absolutely critical — so critical, in fact, that when Jeep found that its Wrangler JL’s track bar mount brackets were failing, it issued a recall and stop-sale to prevent a “vehicle crash without prior warning.”

How The Failure Happened

So that brings us back to Utah native Fenn, a general contractor, real estate agent, and “vice president of training and education for a SAS company that provides software tools to real estate professionals.”

“Several years ago, a friend took me to Moab, and we went rock crawling for the first time. It was something that I’d always wanted to do and just never had the opportunity, but that first trip hooked me,” he told me. “My first Jeep was a 1995 Jeep ZJ that I purchased for my son when he got his driver’s license. I purchased it from a family member who was the original owner. It was so clean that we decided it’s probably not one that we wanted to take off-road.”

This got Fenn involved in the ZJ Grand Cherokee community, where he found a tastefully modded 1994 V8 Grand Cherokee, with a 3.5-inch lift and stock axle housings with 4:56 gearing, 30-spline chromoly shafts, and a rear Eaton E-locker. On the ends of those axles, Fenn added 35-inch mud-terrain tires, plus he bolted on rock sliders, a second battery, a cowl intake, one-ton steering, and much more.

What he built is a beast that he off-roads hard, which is why he was comfortable joining some friends on this Labor Day Moab trip even though those friends were rocking Jeep Wrangler JKs on 37-inch tires. “The first trail we did while we were there was Behind the Rocks, which has a few pretty significant obstacles, including Rubble Hill, High Dive, and White Knuckle Hill,” Fenn told me. “I was able to climb Rubble Hill and make it down White Knuckle Hill, but opted to take the bypass around High Dive because I don’t think I have the clearance to make it down that without rolling. I rolled this Jeep last October on Hell’s Revenge and didn’t want to spend another trip with it upside down.”

Here’s a look at that roll:

“The break happened on Poison Spider, which is a moderately difficult trail in Moab, but one of my favorites.” [Ed Note: This is a very tough trail to the average off-roader. -DT]. “Once you get through the part of the trail known as the waterfalls, I started hearing a clunk from the rear end that I immediately knew was the sound of something that had broken. At such slow speeds on these trails, I didn’t feel anything from the cab, but the
noise was a solid indicator that something had broken.”

A Serious Failure, An Unserious (But Functional) Repair

Fenn crawled under his ZJ and “immediately noticed that the drivers side upper control arm bracket, which also includes the rear track bar bracket on the axle, had torn clean off the rear axle.”

As Fenn notes, this isn’t uncommon on the Dana 35 rear axle. “I wheel this fairly hard, so I’m sure that it had just fatigued over time,” he guesses. “The stock brackets are 1/8-inch steel, and being a 32-year-old rig without any reinforcement finally took its toll.”

Fenn had to figure out how to get back to the road and ended up getting lucky, as someone on the trail had a portable welder. “We started by attempting to strap the bracket for the upper control arm and the track bar to the axle using a combination of tie wire and ratchet straps. One thing I love about the off-road community is that if you’re stuck on the trail, people are always willing to stop and lend a hand. There was a group of four or five rigs that came by and asked if we needed help. We asked if they had a portable welder, and luckily one of the rigs had one.”

And while Fenn managed to connect that welder to the ZJ’s dual-battery setup and actually weld the control arm back to the axle, there were bigger issues.

“What we didn’t realize is that the welds for the track bar mount were also fatigued and cracked, so our focus with the welder was spent on the control arm bracket. After we welded that back together, we made our way back down Poison Spider and back down into Moab, and made it back to our Airbnb without any issue.”

That’s when problems arose again.

“The next day, on our drive home, I noticed once we got up to highway speeds that there was far more swaying, and the Jeep was walking all over the road. I knew that there was still something wrong, so I pulled over and crawled underneath again. I noticed that the
welds on the track bar bracket had finally given way, so that rear axle was simply walking back and forth underneath the Jeep and causing me to walk all over the road.”

Fenn, who considers himself a handy guy when it comes to finding scrappy solutions, knew what he had to do: Instead of worrying about the track bar bracket, he was going to focus on the track bar bracket’s job: Keeping the axle centered under the vehicle, especially when under lateral loads (while steering). “The thought came to mind that if I could triangulate something that would hold it in place, then I could probably make it home. In other words, I figured that if I could create my own triangulated four-link suspension, then at least I’d be able to make it the three-hour drive home.”

By “triangulate,” Fenn is referring to the concept of building a triangle whose two sides (i.e. not the base of a triangle) can work to restrict motion. “I didn’t have anything stiff or rigid…in the Jeep, but I did have ratchet straps….The first thing I did was connect a ratchet strap from the passenger side of the frame, where the upper control arm mounts to the frame, and run the ratchet strap down to the lower control arm bracket mount on the passenger side of the axle. As I tightened that, I was able to pull the body over far enough so that it was centered, and then ran another ratchet strap in the opposite direction from the passenger side of the frame to the driver’s side axle. Tightening those two things down meant that I effectively triangulated my axle under the body.”

It was a clever (if sketchy) solution, and routing it so that the straps didn’t melt against the exhaust or abrade against the driveshaft was tricky. In time, though, Fenn figured out a ratchet strap routing that seemed OK. “My Jeep drives pretty comfortably at 70 or 75, but I opted for a bit slower speed just in case and poked along at about 60 mph. I was pleasantly surprised at how solid the ride was the rest of the way home. I made sure not to take any corners or bumps too harshly, just in case, but I was fortunate enough to make it home without any other incident.”

As for the future, Fenn plans to fabricate a long-arm suspension setup for the front and rear of the Jeep. “Part of that project will be reinforcing all of the stock bracketry on the axles,” he said, though in the end he’s likely to just swap out the axles for something beefier. “Eventually, I’d like to put 1-ton axles and 40-inch tires underneath. I’m planning the current suspension upgrades with that in mind. All of the bracketry around my frame will
be built strong enough to handle those 1-ton axles and larger tires.”

“I’m sure I’ll buy other Jeeps and other rigs over the years, but this one is really my first off-road rig, so I’ll just keep fixing it and upgrading it till the day I die.”

All Images: Tyler Fenn