Where the Heck is that Squeak?
Ok, so the other day...a few weeks ago...we got some really good rains come through the area, that especially with the still frozen ground, caused a lot of standing water. So naturally, I was hitting a lot of puddles on the way home because...i have a Jeep, it's fun, and you never get too old to go play in a puddle! But when I got home, I had this horrible metal on metal squeaking sound that seemed to be coming out of the rear, whenever a bump was hit or I closed a door, especially the rear door. It gave me such a horrible feeling as I was hoping I didn't do any damage to anything cuz I really didn't wanna have to ake any repairs, but I was maybe a little on the aggressive side with some of the "puddles" (some were like small ponds, haha). So anyways, knowing it was in the back, I crawled underneath and started looking for where metal could be rubbing and started grabbing and shaking a lot of stuff, and finally found that the exhaust shield, that thin, flimsy piece of metal that sits between the underside of the body and the muffler, had pulled out of the driver side bolt holding it to the body and had fallen onto the muffler. I felt much better seeing this, knowing it wasn't anything over critical and that I could easily fix it.
But as a side note, I believe this design is extremely stupid in that the washers that compress the shield to the body are BARELY larger than the hole in the shield! Why did they not put a bigger washer on there? Unless my is really that deteriorated? But it's only like 2/3's of the edge of the hole, like a couple mms are actually under the washer, so definitely no question as to why it fell off, more like why didn't it fall off sooner?
This is the side that fell off, and you can see the size of the hole to the size of the washer on the bolt:
This is the good side that did not fall off, and you can see that it looks like it is barely on there:
Here you can see how long the stud is:
Anyways, back to fixing, I was having a heck of a time finding the right socket to actually get the bolt (it looks rusty, but it wasn't an issue to turn once I got the right socket). I finally ended up narrowing it down to an 11 mm socket, but the stud the bolt goes on is so long, I had to try and find a deep socket, of which, I did not have any 11 mm, only 10 and 12 mm, however, I was able to find the equivelent in SAE sockets which fit just close enough to loosen the bolt maybe 10 turns. I was then able to fish the shield back up on top of the washer and tighten the bolt back down.
So in the end, the shield once again feels secure, however, it's still only held on by 3 bolts that barely are making contact with it, so...for the moment it's there, as I didn't feel like taking all the bolts out, but I may either end of removing it, or the more likely option, I may grab some bigger washers to throw on there to prevent this in the future.
