It was a Long weekend
Too bad the sun goes down so early or i might have been able to get more work down and not spread it out over the whole weekend.
Well many of you may now from some threads i have started that i have a pretty bad squeak coming from my rear passenger side wheel. so this weekend i took on the task of tracking it down and seeing if i can fix or at least find the problem.
From reading many threads and asking questions i had already thought my squeak was do to a possible bent axle flange, so i dove in head first on this project. (bad idea) this is how my weekend turned out:
Saturday:
Started off with pulling the wheels, spacers and taking the calipers off. This was the easy task.
started to get difficult when i really had to persuade the rotors with a hammer to break it loose of the salt, rust, and whatever else Utah weather puts on cars.
so then i cleaned up the rotors and the Break shoes for the e-brake. This is where i probably should have stopped and checked out the Brakes to see if they might have been the problem. but no.. this being my first real experience in mechanics i didn't know the rule: Start small and then look bigger (or something like that)
So then i decided to pull the axles. everything with the axle looks good, and come to find out, you still cant tell if its bent when pulled from the housing
. anyway i put it back in only to run into a problem when trying to bolt it back up. the wheel was not spilling when i was tightening the nuts. It was like the bearings where being locked up from something. So after a lot of playing around and pulling the axle and then putting it back in about a dozen times i was finally able to get it put back together and bolted up. but i left my jeep on stands for the night because i was afraid i damaged something.
Sunday:
finished cleaning up the rotors and brake shoes on the driver side and then bolted everything up to take it for a drive and see if that fixed my squeak. Also to hopefully figure out that i did not damage my bearings. Good news was that the jeep drove and the bearings seemed to be fine. Bad news, i still had the squeak... But, it wasn't AS bad. so i put it back on stands and pulled the tires and calipers off. this is when i found that i had a brake pad retainer missing from my passenger side caliper. so i bought a brake kit and replaced all the retainers and added a little bit of lube to the ends of my pads. this was all done in the dark so i was using my rock lights for some light (BAD IDEA). after a long process of getting the pads back in and calipers torqued down i was really excited to do a test drive and see if this fixed it. Only to add to my frustration that my Battery had dead! So after trying to jump it from my girlfriends Audi i came to the conclusion that maybe after my jeep was on stands and since i was already low on gas that this might be why it wasn't starting. ran down to the gas station and got 2 gallon gas can. put the gas in and then hooked the batteries back up again. This time we let her car run longer while the cables were set up and with luck i was finally able to start my Jeep and take it for the much anticipated test drive.
At this point i can say while keeping my fingers crossed that the squeak has gone away! i can only hope it will stay like this. and that i learned a valuable lesson in mechanics this weekend.
