What should have been a 30 minute job turned into an all afternoon thrash. Long story short, the stabilizer is known NOT to come off easily, even beating with a BFH won't extract it. So a trip to Harbor Freight and a pitman arm puller later and it was off. The other end has a built-in bushing that was about .100" too wide - and I could see that "the last guy" had ground it down on the old stabilizer, so I followed suit. Re-assembled with never seize which hadn't been used the last time this part was replaced - I'm honestly a bit surprised that it isn't the original one. Zorba's Jeep
Miscellany
Finally found a front plate I like. "i.n.C.R." means "Isla Nublar Costa Rica" and the "06" is the year this Jeep was
made. Grille inserts and fog lite guards are primarily for rock protection, but they also dress up the front end a bit.
New Monroe steering stabilizer.
Shown with new pneumatic grease gun - see text.
Old stabilizer.
Pitman arm puller used to push tapered bushing out.
Old and new stabilizers - same brand.
New stabilizer in place.
The aftermath - note new hand pumped grease gun - see text.
That was the easy part - the new stabilizer wasn't really any more than "the usual hassle" to get installed. Then I went to lube the front end - 7 zerk fittings. A 5 minute job, right? Wrong. This was the thrash! Long story short, the "Grizzly" pneumatic grease gun is on its way back to Amazon where it came from, and a new hand pumped version was sourced locally and worked right out of the box. I struggled with the pneumatic for at least 3 hours trying to get it to work, finally concluded it was a pile of junk, and sent it back! Hecho En China I'm sure... Unfortunately, I couldn't source a pneumatic locally, and I wanted to just GET THIS DONE, so I went ahead with a hand unit.
Had to pull the Jeep into the garage for this job...
Dark colored top...
Masking tape...
Including over the windshield frame rubber.
First coat, see text.
Just the top!
2nd coat next day.
All done. Jeep moved outside.
From an elevated position...
Not really visible from lower angles.
From above.
Front end.Its HOT in Florida, 6 months of the year. The Jeep's dark colored hard top doesn't help, so I took a page from school busses and painted it with white RV rubberized roof coating. I'll probably also put in some insulating panels on the inside, but the white roof coating should help reflect a good deal of heat! Its fairly invisible except from the front.
Got tired of looking at the chipped paint on the edge of the doors.
This matching red stripping was easy enough to install, although
I needed to add some glue at the top end because of the radius.
Glamour shot in the rain.Read on for the next part!
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