Sunday, March 27, 2011

Busy day

Changed my oil, lubed my Jeep, then bought a SSD for my travel laptop and am currently installing Windows on it (yeah, yeah, I know, but I need it for talking to my ham radios and GPS's and such and all that software is Windows-based, not Linux or Mac based). I was going to change the fluid in my front differential too, but I discovered that my tube of black silicone had burst at the bottom of my toolbox (too much slamming heavy hammers around in there I guess), meaning I had a sticky gooey mess but nothing to seal the differential cover with. By the time I got more goo, it was dark outside and I'm not interested in working on my Jeep in the dark. (Excuses, excuses ;).

Talking about which, the TuxJeep is 5 years old now. So I'm in the process of doing the 5 year maintenance. Next up is going to be to change the radiator fluid, I got some of that very pricey Chrysler-certified Zerex HOAT coolant (same stuff that Mercedes Benz cars use, i.e., not your run-of-the-mill green crap from the discount store) to do the job. Then comes the transmission and transfer case fluids. I figure changing them every 5 years is a good policy regardless of what the official service manual says...

-- Badtux the Busy Penguin

2 comments:

  1. You'd be amazed how much chemistry there is in coolant.

    Trans fluid, too. The engineer that developed the trans fluid worked directly for me, the last couple years of my career. Don't be hasty about getting into the trans or transfer case fluids. How many miles do you have on the Jeep?

    Cheers!
    JzB the lubricated trombonist

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, I'm quite aware of the chemistry of the coolant. What is in my Jeep is a hybrid organic acid technology (HOAT) coolant, which combines some of the best qualities of the GM orange OAT crap, with some of the traditional silicate chemistry to help protect the aluminum bits and pieces from the acid wash. It has a rated lifespan of 5 years and its 5 years is up. Time to change before it turns to sludge.

    The transmission in my Jeep uses Syncromesh fluid. This is basically synthetic automatic transmission fluid with some additional additives to make it work reasonably well in a manual transmission. The transfer case and power steering use Chrysler ATF+4 synthetic automatic transmission fluid, which has the friction additives that Chrysler wants for their automatic transmissions (but that's not relevant for this) *plus* is a very high quality synthetic lubricant, with a wide temperature range that allows it to flow well even cold.

    In other words, I have absolutely no intention of putting anything other than the specified fluids into my Jeep. They are high quality fluids (as they should be, since they were specified when Daimler owned Chrysler), and I'm not going to put crap fluid in there.

    Only exception to the quality fluid thing is the brake and clutch fluid, which is a bog-standard DOT3 fluid. I need to change that out too, since DOT3 absorbs water (which is good because otherwise water would collect in places like the wheel cylinders, which you do *not* want to rust and seize!), time to find my vacuum pump wherever I stashed it...

    ReplyDelete

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