Wahoo! The Jeep is working again. See. I do my own brakes. The job is an hour or two tops. But this time I misplaced my Haynes manual, and forgetting that Autozone has repair manuals online for free, I grabbed some torque settings off a forum and ran with them. Buuut I grabbed the number 41 and decided the brake caliper bolts should be 41 foot-pounds but nooooo 41 newton-meters is what the forum was referencing. And 41 ft-lb is much more torque than the 30 ft-lbs that I should have been using. So at about 35 ft-lbs the bolt turned to butter and snapped. Ahhh! Brought me back to my freshman engineering classes at the University of Tennessee. We had this cool machine that would stretch metal bars until they thinned in the middle and snapped. Somehow we were supposed to associate numbers with the snapping but mostly I stared in awe at the great coolness. Anyhow, this is how the Jeep has looked for much of the past week:
My daughter is very pleased that I will no longer be commandeering her car! I’m sure it would have been Karate Kid uncool to have mom dropping the senior off at high school holding cars keys and a parking pass.
Update: Ride into client’s office went well today. The Jeep even stopped without having to run it into anything! I did catch a check engine light for a bit on the Interstate but after stopping at Starbucks the Jeep seems happier.
