February 2016 | 181,250 miles
With the rear end back on two wheels and mostly buttoned up it was now time to tear into the front end. This was going to be a whole 'nother animal, since there’s just so much extra stuff going on up there. And in addition to all that noise I had the grand plan to completely disassemble and re-engineer the suspension by adding a long arm setup.
I mentioned a few posts back that I had opened a can of worms with this moonshot project. At this point the worms began to all spill out at once. Like the rear end, I was going to begin by totally removing the front axle, which meant disconnecting all the steering and driveline components attached to it.
As the spanners turned and the bolts either sheared or rounded off, I realized that this was not going to be as simple as was the stone-age suspension in the rear. There was rust everywhere. Ugh, everything was covered in it, making me realize that there was a lot of “while I am in here” kind of decisions to consider.
A rusty starter or steering gear was one thing, but those transmission fluid lines made me wince. They were about in the same state as the rusty steel brake lines that had originally sent me down this insane edition of project creep. Might have to fix them too, I guess…
After many a busted knuckle and a few blunted sawzall blades the front axle was finally out. The next phase of this project was underway, with the end in sight. Or was it? Where was the end exactly?
I was eight months into this, and as far as I could tell I was barely a quarter of the way into all of the planned items I wanted to address. After the month or two it would take me to get this front end back together I still needed to disassemble the transfer case and install a slip yoke eliminator kit. Then there was the slew of engine items I wanted to “freshen up” on the 180,000 mile old tractor engine. And not to forget all of the interior stuff awaiting my attention (seat swap, headliner repair, etc.).
Oh, and lets not forget the thing that got us into all of this mess in the first place: the brakes. I still needed to replumb that whole system with new steel lines and soft lines, reinstall all the calipers and rotors, and then go through the bleeding process…
The scary thing was that every inch forward I crept on this thing, the further away the goal line seemed to drift off over the horizon. Not to mention that there wasn’t as much wind in the sails these days. The Cherokee was full long before the start of this project.
And by the time I pulled that front axle out I was a year into having one more kid than the Jeep could handle. So what was I doing this for? Even if I did finish it three, six, twelve months from now, what good would it do for a family full of six adventurers?
Honestly these thoughts had been running around inside and outside of my mind for months by this point. Our Mazda MPV was handling the adventure and daily driving duties flawlessly the past year, but it was against my newly acquired ethics to be down to one running vehicle (remember the Two Is One, One Is None motto).
And no matter how amazing that brilliant machine was, there could come a day when it would need some kind of nitrous oxide upgrade or get impounded by all the haters in the Medellin Cartel. We needed another vehicle that made sense for a family of six…with a heavy dose of adventure on our minds.
Needless to say, while this axle lay sprawled out in my carport, there were already things in motion that would change the state of our family fleet for the much, much better…depending on how you look at it. And of course it would fall on the shoulders of our amazing MPV to get that ball rolling.
