hi, new to this forum not sure where this question belongs. I have searched but cannot find anything to describe what my truck did today. I recently bought an 06 lbz extended cab short bed 4wd and seem to be having issues with the 4wd. everything seemed to work fine when I bought the truck a month ago. today I put the truck in 4 hi while on some muddy back roads. it switched into 4wd perfectly fine and I drove about a mile like this. At the end on the road I stopped and put the trck back in 2wd. once I started driving again it still felt like it was locked in 4wd, but the push button for 2wd was lit up. about a half mile down the road, there was a huge bang and the truck went back into 2wd. shifts from 2wd to 4wd and back perfectly fine sitting in my driveway now. any ideas on what is going on would be great, thanks
Help: banging out of 4wd
- Thread starter Jon7891
- Start date
Thanks I will try that today. When it happened it felt like the transfer case fell out of the truck. I actually pulled over to check out underneath 
Check your tires. I had that issue and it was excessive wear on the rear tires. Rears wore down, fronts didn't, rears were spinning faster, and the t-case could not disengage. Sometimes it can help to rotate tires, sometimes you have to buy new tires.
This was a weird case for me, my tire guy suggested soft compound winter tires. 7k miles later the rears had worn to be 1.5" smaller circumference, t-case was always in bind on pavement. Solution for me was to always use a harder compound tire for winters.
And.... no I did not do a bunch of burnouts on my new $1200 set of winter studs.
This was a weird case for me, my tire guy suggested soft compound winter tires. 7k miles later the rears had worn to be 1.5" smaller circumference, t-case was always in bind on pavement. Solution for me was to always use a harder compound tire for winters.
And.... no I did not do a bunch of burnouts on my new $1200 set of winter studs.
What I do when I switch back to 2WD is swerve (gently) left and right across the road. By turning the wheels reasonably sharp, it changes the speed of the front driveshaft vs. the rear and seems to help it disengage fairly quickly. But I rotate my tires every 5k miles, and they stay about the same size.
If that doesn't work, try backing up straight, or while turning. That will always get it disengaged for me. These are all tricks I learned on manual transfer case trucks. They would bind up hard enough you couldn't pull the lever out of 4HI to save yourself.
If that doesn't work, try backing up straight, or while turning. That will always get it disengaged for me. These are all tricks I learned on manual transfer case trucks. They would bind up hard enough you couldn't pull the lever out of 4HI to save yourself.
^^this. there is no reason to go into neutral from 4hi to 2hi and vise versa. Only when going into 4lo. if it wont come out of 4hi, reversing and turning a bit should kick it out. if that still doesnt do it, there are worn out parts inside that need fixing...
Thanks for the responses everybody. I will try swerving a little or backing up next time. Do the tires really make that big of a difference? My rears are not worn that much more than the fronts.
if you reverse, it should make no difference. if you want to run asphault in 4hi and the rears half worn to the front, it can make a difference. same reason subaru requires you to put 4 new tires on their cars if the difference in rear tread to front tread is more than 4/32 iirc
My explorer is the same way, when I bought it, it had two tires that measured a 1/4" or so off for some reason, they were new, but it binded up in turns and hopped when you mashed it, new 265's and it was fine every sense.
The other issue is most use a viscous clutch inside the tcase and it will prematurely burn it out since front and rear shaft will spin at slightly different speeds. The all wheel drive grand Cherokees were horrible about that