On the way into work one morning I noticed smoke coming out of my passenger-side wheel well while stopped at a stop light. Since it wasn’t on fire, and I was pretty close to the shop at that point, I figured I’d just limp into work to see what’s what.
Once I’d gotten the wheel off it was pretty obvious that the caliper had locked up. The rotors were pretty scorched as were the pads. I’d replaced the calipers two years previously, so with the lifetime warranty attached to the replacement parts store unit I quickly swapped things out so I could get back on the road and home by end of the work day.
If only things were so easy…next lesson, the mutant cousin of the While You Are in There mindset, aka Project Creep.
I just bled the everlovin’ heck outta my brakes to get a firmer pedal, better modulation, and stop the squealing under cornering. I got the firmer pedal.
Oh! And now that I’ve got the skid plate installed, it would appear the front bumper is loose?
Haha…a loose front bumper sounds like an excuse to install a light bar. You wouldn’t happen to have one of those laying around collecting dust, would you?
P.S. - I added the date and mileage stamps to the build thread from seeing how you do it on yours. Very helpful to see those for reference.
There are more than just one reason why a brake caliper can seize, as I was to learn when my brake continued to grab despite the new part. Long story short on this particular case, I found that the reason my brakes were hanging was in the old soft lines de-laminating on the inside. Looks like I’d need to replace those…
And when looking at the soft lines I caught sight of the sorry nick the hard lines were in. Because of the rust, they’d better be replaced as well, sooner than later.
And on the subject of brake lines, what about those fancy stainless steel kind that the race cars use? And if we’re gonna go that route, how long do they need to be? If I get ones just long enough, what if I lift this Cherokee some day? Am I going to lift it someday? Hmm…always kinda wanted to do something like that?
And so it goes. Proper Project Creep, and because of a strange set of converging influences the creep would get deep real quick.
2007-11: earned two incomes, but lived on a one income budget so we could pay down our debt.
2009-15: drove a reliable, payment free Cherokee.
2010: had kiddo #1.
2011: had kiddos #2 & #3 and dropped to one income so wife could stay home.
2014: got out of the rental rat race and bought a fixer-upper house.
Jan. 2015: had kiddo #4.
Jan. 2015: bought the greatest minivan ever created to fit the four kids and dominate the daily duties.
Feb. 2015: paid off all our debt sans the mortgage.
Apr. 2015: sold the old blue minivan AT A YARD SALE for thousands more than I paid for it (it was free).
For purposes of this build thread (reality isn’t so neat and tidy), I was batting a thousand, so you would assume the next move would follow suit. Nope. Let the stupidity ensue…
Summer 2015: rather than replace a caliper and brake line for <$100, dump thousands and thousands of savings into a moonshot Jeep project. Brilliant! …but didn’t you say you had a fixer-upper house? Shouldn’t you have put those thousands into it? Nope. Jeep! …do you know how to completely reconfigure the suspension, transfer case, interior, etc. parts that you’re planning to modify? NopE! JEep! …and didn’t you say you had four kids? Can you fit four kids in a Cherokee? NoPe. JeEp!! …and with four kids, when do you plan to do all this work? NOpE. jEEP!!! …and what about…NOOOPPPPEEEE! JEEEEEEEEPPPPPPPPP CHEROKEEEEEEEEE PROJecT TIIIIMMMMEEEEEE!!!
With the daily AND adventure duties safely in the hands of the MPV, it was time to break ground on the Jeep Cherokee Moonshot Project. And what better tool to begin with than the DEATH WHEEL.
Note the stupidity right off the bat…first time using this fabled implement of destruction and of course I would use it to shoot sparks all over oily cardboard and drain pans. Nothing like cutting your arm off AND catching on fire at the same time.
If you noticed in the pictures, the rear axle is already out, and I’m giving it the third or fourth attempt at getting these rusty, seized leaf spring bolts out. Removal would require the nuclear option, but since I didn’t have a space-age plasma cutter I opted for the medieval tools at hand. Well, medieval if you ignore electricity.
At the end of things I had the rear end of the Cherokee taken much further apart than I’d ever attempted before. But even at this point I knew enough to know that disassembly is often the easiest and quickest part of the project. The can of worms was officially opened.
Hahaha…you should do an article about it then. I could be interviewed “in character” for a cheekier look into the real deal of the minivan subculture.
I’ve been working hard to catch this thread up to the van’s so that I can start interweaving the stories, and now finally have them both sync’ed together. Yet getting them to the current day is another story that I’m working hard to do, but that will require many more posts and the eventual introduction of a third character (soon).
I will be doing some actual work on the van tomorrow to get it ready for a Spring Break road trip adventure with the family…if the coronavirus doesn’t kill us all first, that is.
Aww shucks man. You’re making my head swell. Thanks for the nod on the podcast the other day. I’ll repay the kind words with a beer or two at Expo West…if, again, the coronavirus doesn’t kill us all first.
You’re going to run into it eventually, and it sucks. It makes everything harder. It never sleeps. It’s always spreading…it’s spreading somewhere right now as I type. It makes your eyes hurt when it falls into them laying under your beloved car, and it makes them hurt when you cry your little heart out when the cancer finally takes your beloved car from you.
I’m not sure what stage of rust my Jeep was in, but as I took things apart it was clear that the cancer was everywhere. When I bought this Cherokee the Carfax said that it had spent most of its life in Georgia, but originated somewhere up in Ohio. I guess the disease set in early then, only slowly spreading down South rather than going Stage 4 before coming into my hands.
As already seen I had to cut out the rear leaf springs because of the rust, but had also already lost the rear bump stops due to rusted off studs on the uni-frame rails. The upper studs for the rear shocks snapped off as well. This was going to be an uphill battle, but also a learning experience in how to prevent, remediate, and repair the ravages of rust. Every gearhead needs to know how to deal with this common foe.
With the back axle and leaf springs out of the way I could get after several other items wrapped up in the back end project. One of these was the rear trailer hitch. Though it was an OEM hitch, judging by the way it was wired in I’d have to assume it was a half-ditched effort by somebody after the fact.
The goal here was to grind back the rust and repaint the hitch, as well as repair the wiring mess. I’d found an OEM loom at the junkyard that I hoped I could splice into whatever was already on my Jeep so that things looked a bit more clean and tucked in than the twisty twist and tape install.
The rear uni-frame rails were going to be a busy piece of real estate with the tow hitch, gas tank skid plate, and rear leaf spring hanger brackets all incorporated into it in some way. I refinished and cleaned up the threads on the rear nut strips so that there’d be no trouble bolting things up once everything was ready to go back in.
After getting the hitch and rear bumper out of the way it was time to get the death wheel back out. These rear leaf spring hanger brackets were the next thing needing to go, and when they did it would mean no turning back on the suspension modifications.
I treated the surface rust on the uni-frame rails and painted before setting the new hanger boxes in place. They are designed to be 100% bolt-in, but could also be welded in if you’ve got the skills for that. I didn’t (and still don’t), so that meant I’d need to put two new holes up through the boot floor to secure the top of the hangers.
I have no idea how my fuel tank got this dent in it. I was not a rock crawler, nor had I ever been in any kind of accident that would have left this kind of damage. It must have been something lost to history, known only by the previous owners.
Well, in an effort to prevent future damage similar to this sort in the likelihood that this Jeep did get off-road in the future, a gas tank skid plate would be needed. Luckily for me I had recently found an OEM tank skid at the junkyard. But since it was for the older generation of XJ (pre-'96), it would require a bit of modification to fit the newer tank. More death wheel work ahead.
Those relief cuts were needed to allow the rear of the tank to bend over a bit. I knew just the guy to do this part of the operation, and he even volunteered to mount the tank up for me when he was done.
While in there (and since the leaf springs were still out of the way) I wanted to also tackle the fuel filler hoses. They were old and falling apart by this stage of their life, and the protective cover needed a little rust remediation and modification with the death wheel to fit the new leaf spring perches anyways.
With those final items taken care of I could start hanging things off the rear of the Jeep again. Trailer hitch, trailer wiring loom, gas tank skid plate, and rear leaf spring hangers completed and installed. Next time I’d turn my attention to the rear axle and the bits that keep it stuck under the rear of the Cherokee.
Next item needing attention would be the rear axle. Rusty like all the rest, so in addition to a drain & fill on the fluid I’d strip it down and repaint the housing. Again, I’m not a fan of pink or lime green underwear on a Jeep so it would be chassis black all around.
Another item I dealt with (with the help of a friend with a welder) was to repair some wear spots on my rear brake backing plates. If you remember I pulled the disc brake assemblies from a junkyard Grand Cherokee to upfit my XJ. Something that I learned to be a common problem on older cars is that the spots where the brake pads land can become worn and grooved over time, leading to pads that don’t slide smoothly.
I had him fill those grooves with weld so that I could file the lands back down smooth. Hope that helps things out. Brake issues got me into this moonshot fiasco, so might as well fix the brakes as well as possible since I was disassembling and re-configuring the entire vehicle in an effort to fix a single brake line.
…and while doing that I figured I’d paint all the new brake bits in a futile effort to prevent them from rusting in the future. Prevent is a bit of hyperbole. Hinder might be a better description of the actual efficacy of all this. But progress was happening. Very slowly, but certainly. Looked like the MVP MPV would have to fill in on the adventure duties since this Jeep would likely not be ready for a while.
With the rear axle painted it was time to put it back underneath the Cherokee. The suspension I chose to go with consisted of several ARB’s Old Man Emu bits. As it pertains to the rear, Dakar leaf springs (with an integrated helper leaf) and Nitrocharger Sport shocks.
I didn’t have any extreme plans in mind for my Jeep. I wasn’t building a rock crawler. But I also wasn’t building a high school budget shitbox. I wanted to wade into the quality aftermarket parts world, and by all accounts at the time Old Man Emu was hard to beat for expedition-style Cherokees.
I snaked some bolts up into the holes left over by the broken-off studs so I could secure the new shocks. In hindsight I might go back and do something a bit more sturdy, but at the time it seemed like an adequate solution.
The heavier leaf springs should do away with the need for the rear sway bar, which by all accounts is pretty useless on a Cherokee. In fact, earlier trim packages that came with the trailer package or unicorn Dana44 axle didn’t even have them from factory (I’m a little out of date on the specifics here, but you get the idea).
With everything bolted in it looked pretty good, and felt good to be this far along. Still loads to do, but much of it will have to wait until other items are done at a later date. At least it was back on four wheels again…at least for a little while.
