March was a frenzy of activity that I can barely remember. The activity mostly surrounded Caitlyn's XJ. Thus far, we were mostly trying to test the fuel system for problems. We had a heck of a problem getting the right fittings. Christian spent hours looking for the right fittings only to order them and get sent the wrong part. We ordered one part 3 times and they kept sending us the same "wrong" part. Either their bin is mislabeled or the same incompetent employee keeps grabbing the wrong part. We also worked on collecting other parts that we knew we needed.
We finally got around to hunkering down to take apart her axles this month. They were cleaned and painted by the girls while Christian worked on the differential gears. We were supposed to put in the TJ gears since they were more appropriate for her bigger than stock tires.
He also had to machine some custom tools to make some of this work possible or easier.
We didn't get to do anything over Christian's Spring Break. He was actually sick through most of it. He couldn't even work on the car much. Christian and Emily, however, decide that they wanted a 3D printer. We had ordered a couple of 3D printed parts for the vehicles from Etsy and there were some other ideas they had in making stuff. So Christian spent most of the first part of his break fiddling around with that.
They were originally going to build one, but decided that they needed to start with a ready made kit to get some knowledge about how it works.
When we finally got back to working on the XJ, we had run into some additional problems. We found that we had to replace the spider gears in her back axle. We found that we had to replace the pinion yoke on her front and back axles. As we finalized the differential gears and was ready to finish the back axle, we tried to "crush" the crush sleeve (collapsible spacer) to lock in the differential gears with all the new shims, bearings and seals, the new spacer we got from Yukon simply would not collapse. In the process, it ended up destroying her back pinion gear. So we had to stop yet again, to order her a new ring and pinion. On top of that, we had to scrap all the bearings we pressed into it and order new ones. Plus we had to start all over in measuring the pinion depth and all the shims to get the housing back where it needs to be. We also did not ever want to use those collapsible spacers again. Christian had to come up with some way to get around it. We did not have any problem when we did the TJ axles, so this was completely unexpected. We finally came up with a solution and found that something like that actually does exist but only for the back axle and not the front and one of the few companies that make them was Yukon. We vowed never to give them another red cent if we could help it and decided to machine our own solid spacer. It took some time to figure out how to go about that and to get the shims that would make it work. It was all just a nightmare at this point. This whole project was way over budget, monetarily, as well as, time wise.
Ordering parts is a complete crapshoot these days. It is a regular problem now of finding the parts, having them in stock, shipments getting lost or just delayed in transit, shipments getting stolen in transit, not getting the actual parts you ordered or finding something wrong with it or the way the packaged it. It is a pretty awful experience when you are trying to get something done and not just casually buying junk off the internet.
Other than that, the girls and I got to go visit with my family. We got together for the Ching Ming Festival and went out to eat afterwards. It was good to see everyone. Christian stayed home to keep slaving away on the XJ.
