My 1991 Explorer Sport with the electronic transfer case has a lot of trouble shifting into or out of 4x4 or 4x4 low. I have had it looked over, and fooled around with it a bit myself, and I am convinced that it is a wiring problem. The transfer case itself is OK, there is not excessive gunk on the shift motors, and the electronic module in the driver's side rear jack storage area is also OK. Something somewhere else is intermittent.

Since it is unpredictable at any given time whether the transfer case will shift, and since I need predictability but have no real desire to track down the problem in the miles of wiring in this car, I was wondering whether I could simply go to a junkyard and get the manual shift linkage and install that. I would prefer a manual transfer case anyway. So, are the electronic and manual transfer cases fully interchangeable, and could I even reuse my transfer case with the manual linkage?

Now would be a very convenient time to deal with transfer case issues, because the transmission is about to be removed and rebuilt.

 

 

Just saw this, sorry it's a month late. You may have already taken care of this one way or another. I had problems with my transfer case shifting into 4X4 and found this useful URL -

http://www.glue.umd.edu/~singletn/exp.html

Section in there on hubs, diffs, and transfer cases where they describe how to fix the electronic motor that does the 4X4 engagement. Very simple mechanism. I took mine apart and put it back together. Mine failed because the motor didn't engage far enough. It works fine now.