Going topless

One of the wonderful enduring features of the little Jeeps is their ability to shed their top and drive around topless. Although the top is easy to disconnect (6 bolts, 2 cam buckles, a wire harness plug and a washer fluid hose), it is somewhat awkward to handle and large to store. The boys really wanted to see it with the top off (as was I), but I wanted to be able to remove and reinstall the top with one person, as well as having a convienent place to store it. Since our garage has a 11' high ceiling, I thought hanging the top would be a great storage spot. As for removing it we welded up a "T" shaped lifting bracket that had hooks in each door opening and one at the rear when the rear window was open. We then fabricated up some pulleys to guide the steel cable from a small hoist I have, thus lifting the roof straight up. In the pictures you can see the snaking cable from the hoist to the hook with the red weight on it. These are shots of the initial and thus far only, lift we have done.

The lift worked perfectly, and should be able to drop it back on in a couple of minutes.

The Jeep is currently topless in the garage.

Leaky seals

Given the 265,000 km on the Jeep it was not surprising that the differential and transfer case seals were leaking, as evident by the oil and goop on both cases. So, we decided to remove the rear driveshaft, check the U-joints, and replace the rear pinion seal and the rear output shaft seal on the transfer case. Popping out the driveshaft was straight forward. You can see Jonathon wrestling out one of the U-joint caps on the rear U-joint. The front U-joint still looked and felt great so we left it in place. To replace the pinion seal you must first remove the yoke from the rear pinion shaft. Given the 1 1/8" nut holding the yoke was torqured to 200-300 lb/ft, it was quite the exersize in leverage to remove it. No picture, but you can imagine a very large pipe wrench on the yoke with a 3' pipe on the end, with Jason holding it against the frame. Then me with a 3' breaker bar on the nut and my leg pressing against the bar while holding the frame with my hands. But it did come off without much fan fare. Removing the old seals was slightly challenging as it involved chiselling the outside edge inward to provide access for a pair of vise grips to grab and pull it out. Once the seals were changed, including the o-ring on the speedometer pickup (no picture of that but it is the black and white thing with the wire on it next to the output shaft), we simply put the driveshaft back on. Of course that was after reinstalling the yoke and torqueing (sp?) the nut to ~220 lb/ft. You can see the before and after shots, along with the new and "removed" seals.

The pinion seal on the front diff is actually leaking worse, so hopefully we'll replace that next week.