The previous part of this story can be found here, but if you’re just joining us the beginning is all the way back here if you’d like to catch up.
July - September 2013 | 167,500 miles
Down to business.
I swapped out the XJ wheel studs for longer ZJ ones in order to accommodate the discs.
After refitting the axles I noticed how icky the rear diff cover looked, so I figured I’d go ahead and paint it. So I painted it…black. What other color would someone paint these things? Diff covers on Jeeps and trucks to me are like underwear (on a fat guy). The less of it you see the better. Who wants to see a fat guy with red or worse, lime green underwear peeking out? Not cool (though they’re really trying hard there). Filled it up with some fresh, but no less stank gear oil and the axle was good. No leaks.
I also tried my hand at rebuilding calipers. Learned from this debacle that sometimes you can spend more money trying to save it. At least they turned out shiny black after painting them. That’s cool. Couldn’t say the same thing about my brake rotors, but at this time I didn’t know that you were supposed to put on shiny, slotted discs with holes all in them so you can take sick pics for the social medias. I thought that brakes were supposed to be rusty, hence the patina.
I figured I’d better check the front brakes while working on the rears, and probably a good thing I did. They were a widdle bit worn out. I figured I’d replace the calipers while I was at it to know that all four corners were new.
Front calipers weren’t as shiny as the rears, but the rotors were nice and patina’d. So cool.
Next was a bunch of little annoying Chrysler crap to fix, like rear hatch lift struts so the thing would quit slamming shut on my head, and rear hatch bumper thingies to stop the thing from slamming shut on the Jeep. The little things like that are often cooler than the shiny stuff doomed to rust into bland obscurity.
Last items to button up would be another oil change, and another leak repair. The 4.0L has four notorious leak spots when it comes to oil: 1) the rocker arm cover, 2) the rear main seal, 3) the oil pan gasket, and 4) the oil filter adapter o-rings. I fixed the first already, and as far as the second and third item they weren’t bothering me enough to worry about. But item number four had become a major nuisance. But after fixing that…I had one of the few relatively leak-free Cherokees in the whole world. And that was super cool.
Project almost wrapped up, with one more frontier to tackle.