**Extending your hoses**

Before just heading straight out to the river, there is one more important step we went through to waterproof the Jeep.  There are vent hoses on the front and rear axles and the transfer case (and on a manual transmission) that are in a low enough position to pull in water.  While not an instant "doh" like pulling water into your engine, screwing up the compression, and blowing up all sorts of metal pieces, it can cause problems later on down the trail.  Pulling water into the breathers, causes it to mix with your oil, making it foam up and not provide proper lubrication to the moving parts.  Eventually you're looking at some damage, but it can be caught ahead of time the oil can just be drained and replaced.  But if you extend the hoses, you can cast all of those worries aside and know that you did things right the first time.  We bought about 10 feet of hose from Autozone along with some hose-hose plastic connectors.

The axle hoses are run pretty high up already, but it's always better to be safe.  The front one is the most visible, located along the driver side of the radiator, meeting it at the top.  Not too bad, but if water should come over and into the hood, it's the first thing to dip and hit.  The ultimate way to run the hoses would be to route them high into the cab, but we just extended this one along the engine compartment horizontal support bar.

The transfer case hose is for some reason, factory extended forward to sit atop the front of the tranny.  It can be seen from underneath the Jeep, or in the engine compartment near the firewall.  This hose would be the easiest hit by the water so we ran it high up to meet the front axle one on the support bar.  Again, eventually, depending on how sticky of a situation Dana decides to get her Jeep into, the hose could be run into the cab, perhaps along the windshield frame.

One waterproofing advantage the automatic transmission Dana's new Jeep has, is that it is pretty much a closed system.  The problem with a manual along these lines, is that the top is totally open where the shifter goes into it.  Hypothetically water could easily find it's way straight into it unless some major boot modification was implemented.

The last hose, comes of the rear axle and runs along the gas tank line into the hollow behind the break light.  Again, not too bad, but still underneath and a easy pocket for water to find, provided the depth was great enough.  We just made a cross cut in the rubber gasket that the brake light wires follow from atop the tub, and poked our extension through and ran it up the readily accessible roll bar, hiding it underneath the padding.

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