Jeep Axle Repair
Most us can look back at a time when we got stuck in the snow or mud. It’s a horrible feeling. For me personally I get mad at my car when I’m the one that got it stuck…. Last week we saw a customer come in with a really nice Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. He was passing by someone that was stuck and decided to help pull them out. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to pull the vehicle out and the whole ordeal ended up with the need for a Jeep Axle Repair.
“No good deed goes unpunished” – Clare Boothe Luce
Jeep Repair
When the customer brought the Jeep in he was holding a large piece of the axle in his hand and there was a puddle of differential (gears that help move the wheels) fluid under the right front of the vehicle. It didn’t take much time to see where the problem was. The only potential issue here is that when the axle breaks there is a large possibility that the remaining portion of the axle can damage other components when it spins free, or the piece that broke off could damage things on the way out.
One of our Master Technicians checked the whole front suspension and the damaged area. The customer was pretty lucky because the only major problems were the axle being broken and the axle seal. We also noticed an ABS light on the dash that was caused by an improper alignment (the skid light will come on if the steering wheel is off center because the vehicle thinks it’s sliding sideways down the road sideways and the driver has turned the steering wheel to correct course). So we recommended replacing the axle, the seal, and an alignment.
Jeep Service
It was a pretty simple fix. The broken portion of the axle was removed. Then the front differential had to come apart to replace the seal. There are special tools that are “supposed” to make replacing this seal easy but we have the tools and the seal never goes in correctly… So we access the seal by going into the differential. After we put everything back together we performed an alignment.
In conclusion, this was a pretty simple repair. The only problem was that we had to wait a few days for a new axle to come in. Other than that the customer was out the door as quickly as possible and he won’t be towing anyone out of the snow anytime soon. A somewhat happy ending to a good deed that went wrong.