I’ve been doing a little work on my Jeep to keep it roadworthy and to update some of the electronics.
If you’ve ever worked on a Wrangler JK then you know that it has two personalities: 1) under the hood it’s a bitch to work on and 2) everything else on the vehicle can be thought of as a Lego set.
While I didn’t have to go under the hood recently, I did have to replace the clock spring. If God had not created YouTube and had the faithful not posted how-to videos I’d have never attempted it. But he did and they did so I did.
For the uninitiated, the clock spring is a signal carrying ribbon housed in a plastic case that sits under the steering wheel. It allows you to turn the steering wheel and still have use of all of the mounted functions: Horn, cruise control, turn signals, lights, volume and channel control for the radio, voice recognition, windshield wipers, and finally the man/vehicle interface for vehicle information.
To get to it you have to first disconnect the battery and wait 15 minutes, remove the airbag, remove the steering wheel, remove driver knee panel, remove steering column covers (upper and lower), and then remove the clock spring. Once it is out you’ll need to remove both ‘stalk’ one for the turn signal and lights and one for the windshield wipers.
This is what I was staring down once it was disassembled.
When everything stubbornly went back into place all of bells and whistles returned. Feels good to lay into the horn again, driving with anger is just not the same without it.
I also swapped out the radio with a great little ‘plug and play’ package created by Trail Seven. This video shows what I needed to do to get the head unit into dash.
I’ve done more and (of course) there is more to do. It’s all worth it when you consider the many ‘perks of owning a jeep’
