That might be my favorite quote from TGP yet. 
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July - September 2013 | 167,500 miles
If working on my own stuff could be seen as an adventure with every new endeavor, then acquiring new tools should be seen as all the glitzy adventurer kit. An adventurer needs his weapons, his magic keys, his maps. And the more perilous the quest, the more fabled your steel.
As the dinky Fisher Price pliers broke or the cheap Chinesium sockets rounded things off, I’d taken the initiative to slowly level up my kit. There was also a few clutch gifts included in there, like the Craftsman socket set from my dad. Thinking about how long I’ve had that thing and all that it’s enabled me to do, it might be one of the best gifts I’ve ever been given. I’ve taken to giving friends and young guys I’ve mentored a bag of basic tools as wedding presents as a result. Every guy needs the basics, and he can buy the better stuff as his own adventure gets more serious.
And this particular job required a tool that I neither had, nor knew existed. Yet thankfully I was made aware of another key gearhead milestone at this stage…tool rentals at the local parts slinger.
This slide hammer thingy made an impossible job somehow possible…just like a magic key. Looking at it again in this picture I still can’t help but see the thingy Arnold Schwarzenegger stuck up his nose in Total Recall. Oh the things the right tool makes possible, be it in a driveway on Earth or while vacationing on Mars.
Nice thing for a poor guy like me was that I could take the Martian Nose Picker back for a full refund once I was done saving the planet.
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 shiny, slotted discs with holes all in them on so you can take sick pics. 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.
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September 2013 | 167,500 miles
And now we get to my first taste of magic.
In addition to all that other stuff, the Cherokee had a problem with the driver-side window where it wouldn’t roll down very well. I looked into it and found there to be a pretty gnarled up worm drive, so a new regulator was in order.
But there was another issue related to the new fangled power windows on this thing. The child lock feature on the windows, that button that gives you the power to restrict the freedom of all passengers from enjoying fresh air like a you were some sort of communist dictator, well like communism…was broken. Never had to worry about anything like this back in the horse and buggy days of the old Jeep.
Fixing it would be as simple as throwing money at a new part. But there was a familiar problem…same problem as every other time … young guy, lots of kids, blue collar know nothing, with a massive amount of student loan debt … you know the profile. When you’re trying to crawl out of a hole like debt, you eventually get determined and start to look for the shortest road to freedom. We were trying to save money wherever we could to hurl into the debt monster. And that meant trying something different.
Another level up. Fixing parts versus reflex replacing them.
The switch was disgusting, but that wasn’t the issue. I had to crack into it in order to find the real problem. It was a cracked solder point on the underlying circuit board I was told to look for. The fickle nature of the dictator switch was caused by a poor connection, and I would have to employ magic to mend it.
Behold the wand of a level one wizard. Melting metal in order to bring something back to life just sounds like sorcery to me…in the good kinda way. I’m not sure why this got me so excited, nor why the thought of learning to braze and weld in the future does the same, but I really love this kinda stuff.
To me it is the difference between babysitting and conceiving a child. Any civilized person can can be expected to do thirty minutes of the former, but it takes magic and a change of life for the latter. I am a maintenance man by profession. I fix stuff that other people break. I often feel that I am in many ways a professional babysitter of people pretending to be adults. But I don’t create things.
I want to get to the place where I can create new things out of what my hands touch, and when I see fabrication and entrepreneurs and writers and artists and parents doing that kind of stuff, it’s inspiring.
It isn’t soldering, or fixing a circuit board, or even welding steel that I’m necessarily talking about. It’s the mentality and skill combined to take any idea and bring it to life with hard work. That’s magic. That’s real wizard level stuff. I want to get there someday. And here was me on my first day at Hogwarts or whatever dope school Gandalf went to when he was a kid.
P.S. - the repair worked. All of the repairs worked. And so did the upgrades. The Jeep was better than ever, and in many ways so was I. We were ready for another round of adventures.
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Dude.
I got to the pictures of the window switches coming apart and I shit you not I’m thinking, “NO WAY!”
And then you pivot to the that most fundamentally elevating perception–the one that changes everything–and I’m all…
You get it, dude! This is Level 2 Wizardry! You make this discovery and think, "Waitaminute… If I can do THIS, WHAT ELSE CAN I DO?
Here’s to Level 3.
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Summer 2014
In the middle of 2014 we loaded up the Cherokee for a Summertime camping trip. It was to be a time of many firsts. I think this was our first tent camping trip with the boys.
The Jeep was loaded. And when I say loaded…I don’t think we could have fit another bag of potato chips in this thing. Size may have been becoming an issue. The leaf springs were beyond flat to the point of bending over backwards across the top of the axle. Not helping was the dry-rotted bump stops, one or two bumps away from disintegrating into nothing.
Noticed that I painted the wheels at some point since the rear axle project. Thought it turned out good, especially with the silver contrast.
Aside from being the first tent camping trip with the boys it was also the first fishing trip. All three boys landed their first fish.
The boys have been hooked on this kinda thing ever since.
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November 2014 | 178,300 miles
A few months later my headlights stopped working. I fixed them. Good times.
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I see a picture of three wee hobbits in diapers in a tent and think, I have a 7-year old. I can do this.
PS: Are you doing anything special to get the gallery-layout on the pictures up there? I’m seeing one large one, with two smaller ones below it. It looks like you might be bulk uploading and leaving them inline (instead of forcing them to new lines like I do). Is that all there is to it? I love how it comes out.
This is a great build thread. I love how you’re blurring the lines between published stories and the build thread. That’s how it should be done—but it’s a hard switch to make.
I stumbled onto the 50% 75% 100% green thingy on the bottom of the pictures one day and tried the 50% setting. Two 50% sized pics stack automatically next to each other if they’re kept together. This was the result, but only if you are viewing from a computer. On the phone it is still one after the other.
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Today I learned…
Thank you.
#highfive
I’ve been digging into the CSS trying to figure that out for hours so I could work up a fix. 
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Right?
Probably my finest technological achievement.
At the same time I was fixing those headlights I found some time to make a Jeep for my sons. They were getting to the age where they wanted to join in whatever I was doing, but were still too young to be of much help. Whenever they joined in any kind of project task you could basically figure that all forward momentum was halted, and nothing would thereafter be completed.
In an effort to try to give them something they could actually do and have fun with while dad was working on the big Cherokee, thus their little XJ. The last thing I wanted to do was tell them to go away because they were getting in the way, but with this thing I could at least try to steer them into a parallel lane so that forward momentum could be maintained.
I even included a modular engine for them to remove and play around with, made (like the rest of the blue Jeep) out of random pieces of scrap and such whipped together. There were gauges in the dash made from old pressure regulators at work that quit working ages ago, as well as a bunch of buttons from some old analog radio. Kids like buttons.
The gamble seems to have worked out well. They took to the bait, and are well on their way to becoming gearheads themselves. And aside from just working on their Jeep they’ve mimicked all the other things the big Jeep was known for, including adventuring and working.
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Yes sir you can. And you and P won’t regret it.
I’ve heard it said the more often you find yourself doing something, the more time is justified in pursuit of things that allow you to do it better. I’d say XJ Jr. has proven worth the time away from Sr XJ, III.
Because, damn.
April 2015 | 181,200 miles
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.
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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?
C’mon.
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.
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