October 2015 | 181,250 miles
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.
