The Fuel Neck Housing

I’ve been ignoring the gaping hole around where the fuel neck passes through the interior to travel down towards the gas tank. I had a feeling it’d be easy to fix so I never put much thought into it. I honestly didn’t bother to worry about it until I had the floor fully welded in and no choice but to finally address the issue.

Building Out The Cargo Floor

I didn’t want to try to salvage the original cargo area floor from my Jeep. It had rusted through in several spots, and I kinda chopped it up into several pieces because I only removed bits of it as a time when I was fabricating the new frame rails.

Directly below the floor of the XJ in the cargo area sits the gas tank. Tucked tight between the frame rails it rests a mere 1/2" from the floor. The mount for the gas tank is also what braces the floor in the cargo area.

With the frame squared away I needed something that I could mount up the suspension to. The only thing holding in the rear axle at this point was the rear driveshaft and the front mounts of the leaf springs.

The driver side frame rail was in far worse shape than the passenger side on my XJ. I opted to replace the passenger side first since there’s a little less going on on that side. On the driver side the fuel neck hoses pass through the frame, and all of the fuel lines, brake lines, and vacuum lines run parallel down the frame rail.

Using a metal brake to bend up new frame rails wasn’t my plan A. Nor was it plan B. It was actually plan C. I was trying to fix my Jeep on the cheap because this repair wasn’t suppose to happen till spring. That meant no buying extra tools and trying to make do with what I had.

Background

I like to joke and say that anyone else would have sent my XJ to the junkyard.

My Cherokee is rusty, has a laundry list of issues, gets 17 MPG on the good days, and is literally a brick on wheels. But I love it.

The front axle of my Cherokee has been in desperate need of some attention for quite awhile. Just about every component on it was worn to the point of needing to be replaced and the axle housing itself had built up some pretty intense rust.

The Cherokee strikes again. A couple weeks back when my exhaust snapped just before the catalytic converter I noticed my muffler had a minor leak. It wasn’t anything major and wasn’t loud so I figured I could probably just run it till spring and deal with it when it was warmer out.

I’ve honestly been very lucky with my Jeep. My previous daily driver was a 2009 Subaru Legacy, and while it may have been excellent in the snow it had a very high cost of ownership. I figured out that it was costing me on average $100 in maintenance per 1000 miles travelled. It may sound silly to have sold the Subaru and bought a Jeep that was 9 years older but I have zero regrets doing so. The Jeep has never left me stranded, and never surprised me with an issues until recently.