Primitive and modern outdoor skills

Trivial Jeep "mods"

2014-11-08

Well, I got a Jeep. You don't get a Jeep so you can keep it stock. I'm starting easy.

Part of why I got a Jeep is so I would learn more about cars. The stuff here is the super-easy not-too-educational stuff, but you gotta start somewhere.

I didn't buy a hitch on my jeep when I got it. At the time I thought I'd get a bumper with one built in. Anyway, this was $55 on amazon, including wiring harness.

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To mount it you just pull the bumper and bolt it on. The wiring harness (like most) is just a jumper that takes off from the plug on the left-side tail light. I've been spraying more undercoating whenever I expose a new part of the Jeep and this was no exception.

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The well known mirror drain mod turns out to be unnecessary on the 2015 Wrangler. I drilled it first. Later I removed the mirror to use to look up our chimney (we didn't have any other mirror in the house, I guess I don't touch up my makeup enough). Apon inspection they've added a notch to the gasket and set it up so it seems to drain properly. It's been raining a lot and there was no water in it when I drilled it, or when I pulled it off.

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Chrysler, in their infinite wisdom, didn't put drain holes in virtually anything but the main tub. I went through and added them to the plastic tray in the back:

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I unplugged the doors a while ago to so it doesn't "ding" when they are open. I hate that feature in all cars, and carefully broke it in the Tacoma as well.

Lastly, I have no pictures for this, but I purchased a flash-cal. This lets you tweak the computer in a number of interesting ways. Some are only relevent to automatics, but a bunch are useful. I adjusted the front lights so I can use highbeams and fog-lights at the same time (I mean, why would you interlock those in the first place?) I tweaked the front-light timeout which for some reason applies when you turn the car off and then turn the lights off (ANNOYING!). I set it to one second so this doesn't matter. I tweaked the one-touch turn-signal, which again drove me nuts. I hate things with timeouts like that, let me flip a switch on, and then off.

Annoyingly it wouldn't let me adjust the stereo timeout. The stereo keeps playing after I turn the ACC off and then turns itself off about a minute later. I find this rather annoying. I'd much rather it just switched off instantly. Oh well. I suspect there's an update that would let me do it, but I haven't gotten the update software to run under wine yet (windows installer DLL hell).

The original impetus for purchasing the flashcal was so I could fix the TPMS and speedo when I upsize my tires (current plan is 33"). I already tweaked the TPMS so it won't complain until I'm below 20 PSI. I'd rather go on handling and watching the tires carefully than a light anyway. You may notice the tire guage in the last picture.

I've got lots more planned. I'm just doing the super-easy stuff first. I already have a kit for relocating the vacuum pump, but haven't gotten up the gumption and a couple consecutive days where I'm willing to break my daily driver.

UPDATE:
I learned several things today:

  1. blogger's comment system is still totally hosed, after several attempts I've been unable to reply to the comment on this post. I've been intending to migrate the blog elsewhere at some point.
  2. Indeed, said comment is 100% correct for VA.  I found the regulation:
    http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+reg+19VAC30-70-160. It's  I-11-G-1. So, I'll probably be undoing that particular mod. Thank you very much for the comment!