Tag Archives: jeep cherokee

Wednesday 12th August 2015 – AT LAST!

This Hyundai has finally gone.

But it’s not gone far – about 400 metres to the wide grass verge.

Terry turned up tonight with his Jeep Cherokee 4×4 and that made short work of moving it. Unfortunately, Terry’s trailer is just too small for the Hyundai so there’s no possibility of putting it on there. And with me closed down for my holidays, I’m going nowhere tonight with my Brian James car transporter.

Consequently the Hyundai sits on the grass verge and there it will stay until the owner has come up with a Plan B. What this will be will be a depanneuse – a breakdown truck. And had a breakdown truck been summoned on Friday, this Hyundai would have been gone long ago with no stress and no bad feeling and no nothing.

And of course, the question of the degreaser for this oil slick. The car’s owner “didn’t have time” to pick any up. Why am I not surprised? But at least, Caliburn is back home where he belongs.

All of this is an object lesson in how doing things “on the cheap” rebounds with a vengeance because I’m never ever going to be doing anything coming from over there ever again. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!”

But last night, I had a bad night. I was still awake at 05:00 and I woke up again at 06:30. Clearly the stress was getting to me and I really didn’t need that with what I had to do today.Nevertheless in between the bouts of sleep this afternoon I’ve managed to do such a lot of what I had to do and I’ll be finishing the rest in a moment when I’ve eaten my pasta.

And I had a stroke of luck too. I’ve been hunting high and low for my Vox Bass amPlug – the one that you plug into the jack socket of the guitar and plug earphones into it so that you can hear what you are playing. It’s never come to light.

And then there I was, I suddenly had a brainwave, remembering what bag I had taken with me to Belgium and Germany a few months ago. And sure enough, there scrunched up in the bottom of the bag, was my amplug. That cheered me up. On the downside, with sorting out this Hyundai, I missed my shower window. I was looking forward to that, with new bedding and new clothes waiting for me. I’ll have to wait now for Lyon tomorrow night. I hope that no-one on the train complains.

So now I have something like a tidy attic, some bags all packed (and I bet that I have forgotten hordes of stuff) and just a few more jobs to do before I go. I’ll try to have an early night – I need it after last night to be sure, and I’ll be fighting-fit for tomorrow.

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Tuesday 17th June 2014 – SO THERE I WAS …

… out of bed at 06:45, on the road at 07:00 and at Liz and Terry’s for 07:30.

And by 08:30 we were in the queue at the sous-prefecture at Riom. Ticket number 27 which meant that we only had to wait just over an hour – not like when I took Caliburn to be registered in 2009, had ticket 93 and had to wait until 11:50.

Anyway, the Jeep is now registered in France and we went off to the Carrefour to buy the number plates and have a coffee. On the way back we called at the insurance at St Gervais to pick up an updated insurance certificate, and then we went back to Liz and Terry’s and fitted the new plates.

After lunch we came back here and with Terry in the pit and me on the cement mixer, we fitted three rows of breeze blocks. There wasn’t much sun so I could only do the mix bucket by bucket, otherwise the mixer would stall, but we managed all the same and I’m impressed with this little 350-watt cement mixer. Not the quickest or biggest mixer but it mixes the stuff quicker than I can use it.

Tomorrow we’ll do the final row of blocks in the pit and then do the shuttering. That’s going to be exciting because it’s not a square – neither is it a rectangle and it isn’t an quadrilateral either.

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Monday 16th June 2014 – WELL!

So Terry’s Transit and the Jeep have now been for their controle techniques. Both of them have failed but only on minor points, nothing that will prevent them from being driven on the road. There’s a 8-week period for correcting the faults.

Most surprisingly, the brakes on both vehicles passed with flying colours. After all of the work that I put in on them, especially with the handbrake on the Jeep, I was quite impressed and I breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t want to have to do that again.

Terry was of course preoccupied with the controle techniques today and so I was on my own here.

This new submersible pump that I bought the other day, that really did the business. I’ve 400 litres of water now in a pile of dustbins ready to use or cement, and the rest was pumped out and down the lane. It was all over in minutes and made a change from spending hours baling out with a can and bucket.

Caliburn is also emptied of his concrete pillar blocks and they are stacked. I’m leaving the cement in there for now though – the best place to keep it dry and out of the way.

Once I’d done all of that, I did some weeding in the garden for a change. The onion and potato beds are now clear of thistles.

This afternoon, I did what I should have done at the weekend and completed the Radio Anglais texts for the next recording session. I wish that I had done that on Saturday.

So now I’m off to bed. I have to be up at 07:00 as Terry and I are going to Riom to register the Jeep now that it has passed the controle technique. I’m glad about that – that’s one care less.

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Wednesday 4th June 2014 – I WENT BACK …

… to Terry’s this morning.

Although I nearly didn’t. When I woke up this morning it was pouring down and wasn’t fit for anything. I had breakfast and wondered whether to carry on with the web pages but by then it had stopped raining so I headed off to Terry’s.

I checked the handbrake mechanism and the nearside seemed to be working fine but the offside not so, so I stripped down the brakes on that side and, as I suspected, the brake operators had seized.

Taking out the operators was not easy at all, but I dismantled them, cleaned them and greased them. A cut-out in the ear halfshaft and this would have been a two-minute job. And if taking them out was difficult, putting them back was even more difficult. And when they were back the pieces wouldn’t hold together and so I had to end up wiring them in.

And as you might have expected, having done all of that and making sure that all of the brake mechanism was working fine, it made not a ha’porth of difference.

We spent the afternoon working on the nearside brake. I made a few adjustments to that side and that did nothing either, which is a total surprise.

These rear brakes on this Jeep Cherokee are totally bewildering me. All that I can think of is that with the brake drums being brand-new, there’s a surface coating that needs to be broken down before the brakes will grip. So we’ll leave it for a week or two in order to see what happens.

If that doesn’t change anything, we’ll have to strip them right down.

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Tuesday 3rd June 2014 – TERRY RANG ME UP …

… this morning. Apparently his car parts are coming at lunchtime and was I free?

I certainly was and so after the usual couple of hours on the website, I loaded up Caliburn and repaired my big monster trolley jack and then I was off.

I went via Cecile’s and picked up a couple more letters that were in her letter box, and as I arrived at Liz and Terry’s, a white Mercedes van pulled up behind me. It seems that the parts and I had arrived at the same time.

We did the wheel cylinder on the Transit first and then changed the rear shoes and adjusted the handbrake. It took a while to bleed the cylinder and, not being quick enough with my bleed tube, I ended up with a jet of brake fluid up my sleeve when Terry pressed the brake pedal too quickly, but eventually we had the van on the road with all of the brakes working fine.

The Jeep however was another matter.

Changing the shoes wasn’t as easy as it might have been – a cutaway in the face of the halfshaft would have had the job done in 5 minutes and I don’t understand why it is that Jeep has made the job so difficult when it could be so easy because there really isn’t too much to it at all.

We put the new brake drums and discs on and then fitted the new pads (and that wasn’t easy either thanks to Jeep’s overcomplicating what might otherwise be a simple, straightforward job). Terry then took the Jeep for a run and while the footbrake was perfect, the handbrake was useless.

I adjusted it a couple more times and while I could get the shoes to lock up on the inside of the brake drums simply by tightening the adjusters, the handbrake still wasn’t working. It’s a case of of seized cable or seized operating mechanism, so it all needs to be dismantled, cleaned and greased.

By now though it was 21:10 and going dark so I’ll be back here tomorrow. I was covered in oil and so Terry let me have a shower for which I was grateful, and I came back to find that the phone here is down.

It’s not my lucky day, is it?

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