Miles Turner

I almost paid a dealer $970 to change a battery.

If you've owned a Wrangler built from 2019 on, there's one repair that makes a grown man set his coffee down and just stare into the engine bay. It isn't the death wobble everybody warns you about. It isn't the oil filter housing that likes to weep. It's a battery. And not even the big one you can see. It's the little one hiding underneath it. It's the reason a Jeep dealer can look you in the eye and charge you nine hundred and seventy dollars for two batteries you can buy yourself for three hundred. I'm Cole. The Wrangler in my driveway is a 2019 JL Sport, the 3.6 with the stop-start, and I've wheeled it and wrenched on it myself since it was close to new. I'm no mechanic. I framed houses for twenty-two years, and that Jeep is how I get up the forest roads to the spots I like when work slows down in the winter. It's built the way I want it. It starts cold, or it did. My wife Steph quit riding me about the money I put into it a long time ago. I do my own work on it because doing my own work on it is the whole point. What nobody tells you when you drive a new Wrangler off the lot is that it came with two batteries. There's the main battery up top, the one you can see and reach. And underneath it, down in a pocket against the fender, there's a little auxiliary battery that runs the stop-start system. The main one you can swap in ten minutes in a parking lot. The aux one you cannot get near, because it sits buried under the main battery's mount, in a space with no room to get a hand in, let alone a tool. This spring mine started cranking slow. Then slower. Then one cold morning it just clicked and did nothing. Six years is about all you get out of them. Both batteries were done, and the part that gets you is this. If the aux is dead, it'll drag a brand new main battery right down with it. So you can't just swap the big one and move on. You have to deal with the little one you can't reach. The main battery was easy. Two hundred dollars at Sam's Club, ten minutes, done. Then I went after the aux, and I hit the same wall every JL owner hits. I could see it. I could touch the top of it with two fingers. I could not get a tool onto the hold-down bolt and turn it. A ratchet wouldn't fit past the main battery mount. A swivel on an extension flexed and walked off the bolt every time I leaned on it. A stubby had about five degrees of swing before the handle hit metal. An hour in, I'd skinned two knuckles and moved that battery exactly nowhere. So Monday I called the Jeep dealer. The service writer told me the aux is a book job, that they pull the fender liner and go at it through the wheel well, and that two batteries installed would run nine hundred and seventy dollars. He said it the way you'd read off the weather. I asked him to say it again, because I was sure I'd misheard. I hadn't. I told Steph at supper. She set her fork down and said, "Nine hundred and seventy dollars. For batteries. On the Jeep you drive to the hardware store." She's not a car person, and even she could hear that the battery wasn't the hard part. Getting to it was. She was right. A few weeks later I took the Jeep to a trail-day breakfast a local club runs, the kind where thirty rigs park with their hoods up and everybody wanders around drinking gas-station coffee and looking at each other's builds. Two rigs down, a guy about sixty had a JL with a hundred and forty thousand miles on it and a drawer of tools bolted in the back. We got to talking, and I told him the whole thing, the dead aux, the knuckles, the nine-hundred-dollar quote. He didn't look surprised. He just said, "You ever use a chain bar?" I told him I didn't know what that was. He reached into the drawer and handed me a flat blue bar about the length of my forearm. Told me to put my thumb on the end and turn it. Something turned inside it, smooth, no wobble, no hinge. A chain, sealed in the bar. "The chain carries the turn around the corner," he said. "The socket stays dead square on the bolt, so it can't rock off, and you run the ratchet up here where there's room." "The only reason that aux battery is a dealer job is you can't get a tool down to the hold-down bolt. It's got nothing to do with the battery. It's the room." He popped the bottom clips on my fender liner, the little Christmas-tree ones, and folded it out of the way. No rivets, no wheel off. Then he slid the bar down past the main battery mount, set the socket on the aux hold-down bolt where my hand wouldn't go, put a ratchet on the top end, and handed it to me. "Your Jeep. You pull it." It broke loose on the first pull. Square, no walk, no rounding. I got the hold-down and the terminal, lifted the old aux out, dropped a new one in for a hundred and twenty bucks, and the Jeep fired right up and quit cranking like it was tired. He told me to order the tool from the people who make it, not off Amazon, where they sell bars that look the same but have a universal joint inside instead of a chain. Without the chain it just flexes, same as the drawer of swivels that already failed me. The maker sells from their own site, wildbeartools.com. Seventy-nine dollars. Seventy-nine dollars against nine hundred and seventy at the dealer. It paid for itself before I aired my tires back up. But that's not really why it lives in my drawer now. It lives there because a man who built his own rig with his own hands shouldn't have to hand it to a dealer over a battery he can see with a flashlight. I've used it a dozen times since. A bolt behind the airbox I could never reach. A skid-plate bolt tucked up against the frame. My buddy's aux battery on his Gladiator, same exact job. It rides in the tool bag now, where I can get to it. If you've got a JL Wrangler or a JT Gladiator from 2019 on, with the stop-start and the two batteries, you already know the one I mean. The little aux battery hiding under the main. The dealer job. The one no parts store will touch. You don't have to pay nine hundred dollars, and you don't have to tear the whole fender off blind. You fold the liner, and you let the tool reach the bolt. The maker sells direct, from their own site, not Amazon, not the dealer. The knockoffs look the same in the picture. They've got a u-joint, not a chain. They don't hold square, and they don't work. https://wildbeartools.com/products/extension-wrench