It was 11:30PM, rain was lashing very hard, and I was fully wet. And I had to abandon my newly rebuilt Jeep on the highway, at the middle of nowhere. Does this story sound familiar?
Let's start the story from the beginning. As many of you knew, I was supposed to pickup the Jeep on Saturday. However, my younger son was having fever since Wednesday, and my wife and older son fell ill on Friday night thanks to food poisoning. With three patients at home I had to postpone the trip. But the family recovered over the weekend, so I rescheduled the delivery to Monday.
Monday I reached the garage around 2PM, the Jeep was ready and waiting. The final polish was being applied to the paint. Checked the bills, found it satisfactory, and made the final payment. I started off at 3:20PM on a 212Km drive back home. Fueled up at Murnad so that I can avoid going via Madikeri.
When I parked at one place, I applied the brand new parking brakes to test its efficacy, it felt good enough. About 15kms later, I stopped again to make a call, and decided to apply brakes again. But to my horror I realised that I hadn't released the parking brakes last time.
![Shockked](https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/images/smilies/Shockked.png)
I had driven with the parking brake on and had not even felt the drag. How is that possible?
This repeated a few more times. Since I am not used to parking brakes on the Jeep, I forgot to remove it every time. But everytime I didn't feel the brake while driving. Very strange.
Few things that I noticed in the initial 20kms:
The engine temperature stayed just below 60C all the time. Then it occurred to me that they haven't put the thermostat back. Once I started descending the ghats, it got ridiculous, the temp stayed firmly at 40C until I reached the plains. I later checked with the mechanic about it, he said the thermostat had gone bad during the 4 months of engine inactivity.
The battery current indicator remained firmly to the right, towards the positive. Generally it should come to center pretty fast, so this was confusing. I even started wondering whether this is means charging or draining. Since only electrical diesel pump and wiper were drawing battery power, I didn't understand why this is happening. Then I did a test which I remembered from while back. At idle, I pressed the accelerator, it went further right, that means it is charging. I guess the battery had drained quite a bit over the 4 months, so it was happily charging after a long time. Eventually the indicator came back to zero after driving for 150kms.
Now regarding the build. I couldn't hear a single rattle throughout the drive, no matter how bad the road. This Jeep used to be quite a rattler, noise coming from everywhere. Now, there is nothing but the engine noise.
Driving condition was very treacherous, it was raining practically all the way, only the intensity kept varying. At one point, the rain noise almost completely drowned the engine noise. I had to really strain to hear the engine noise over the rain. But this is how it rains in these places. So I kept driving without stopping for rain.
The CJ340 which has XDP engine and 5.38 axle ratio, drives like performance car at speeds below 70kmph, hard to push it beyond that. It can out-torque most petrol cars and non-CRDi diesel cars at lower speeds. And with high-stance, it can put fear of god into hatches when it passes next to them in the twisting roads.
After about 200kms of hard driving, while I was about 12 kms from home, the oil pressure indicator lights up, the oil pressure meter hits zero, and I lose total power in the engine. All symptoms point to total loss of engine oil. I quickly come to a stop on the side and switch off the engine.
To be continued...