Wrenching at JeepRubicon's

so was everything a success......?

fred

I agree, Sara's Jeep looks great.

Chris and I got our front axles totally swapped and are going to start at around 8.30 or 9 tomorrow morning and we're hoping for about another 5 hours or so...

I'm tired.

After 12 hours today, the axles are swapped and I've now got the 4.10 gears that my 33s desire. Good times. I have to admit, I felt in way over my head lots of times throughout this project, but looking back, I'm surprised at how much I learned.

We did the front axles on Saturday and had a lot of help from Josh, Keith, Andrew and Sara. It took us about 10 hours overall. That night we parked our jeeps at Andrew's house and Sue came and picked us up for the night and dropped us off the next morning.

We started today at 9 and things went pretty smoothly at first. Chris had a crazy time getting off one of his shock bolts and had to cut it off. We were able to fully disconnect our rear axles and were moving them from one jeep to another when the axle fell on my arm and got the wound in Keith's pictures. I don't really know what happened but I think when I went to put it on the jack stand, I didn't have it on fully and it fell on me. Sue said I should have gotten stitches. It's cool - I've got a big ravine on my forearm. Andrew wrapped me up and we got back to work. Chris got his axle bolted up pretty quickly. I just couldn't seem to get a break. Nothing was going in smoothly and it took a lot of patience and finesse to get everything on (and a little help from Chris). Chris finished his up at aroud 7 or so and I kept on plugging away. I had big problems getting my shocks back into the mounts. The shocks were just too big on the bottom.

At around 8.30 everything was bolted up, we aligned the front, bled the brakes, tested everything out and headed home sore and tired. My front sway bar ends were not even after all the work. We tried to bend it back in place so we could connect both arms but the link snapped. We put a bolt up there to hold it for now and I'm going to call RE tomorrow and see if I can get a new one this week. I still have my parking brake disconnected which I am going to tie up tomorrow and Chris still has my diff guards which we will take care of this week.

Overall, I had a really good time. Thanks again Andrew for letting us use your garage. I couldn't imagine trying to do this on my lawn with basic tools. We'd still be on the front axles.

I have pix too, I'll try to post tonight.

DrJ