I Need to Remove What?!?

I had two choices.

1. Keep a 3/4 wrench in the Jeep, open the hood, manually crank the engine just enough to move the flywheel to a spot on the gear that would be caught by the starter.
2. Replace the flywheel.

Seems like an easy choice…  Clearly replace the flywheel, OK how do I go about doing that?

Step 1 Remove the skid plate from underneath the Jeep. Sounds OK.

Step 2 drop the transmission.  whoa whoa whoa there must be an easier way.  A work around.  A cheat code.  Dumping the Jeep in the ocean. (not that I could get it out of my garage at this point anyway).

Step 3 remove the clutch. Might as well tell me I have to build a moon module.

I told myself I was gonna do this, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but I thought I would ease myself into it, I didn’t know I was gonna jump right into the deep end.

The skid plate is at the bottom of the Jeep and protects the transmission and transfer case.  It also holds the transmission up.  The skid plate is held onto the frame with 6 bolts, my 28 year old Jeep only had 4 bolts connecting the skid plate to the frame.  It took a whole can of PB blaster and a breaker bar to get three of them off, they were really rusted over.  I have two jacks under the skid plate, I don’t know what is going to happen when this last bolt comes out, is the skid plate going to slid forward, backward or drop to the ground like a turd, with the transmission crumbling into 1000 pieces.  As I try to work that 4th and final bolt, I feel it break free, but something doesn’t feel right.  It is just turning, no friction of an old rusted bolt turning out of the hole. The hole that was in the frame broke loose and is now toast.  Unbelievable.  Now what?  Head over to Home Depot and buy a angle grinder with a metal cutting bit.  Once I cut through the bolt the skid plate slowly rested on the jacks.  I removed the plate with a jack under the transmission.  This process took me most of the day, the time it takes to do anything on this Jeep is automatically quadrupled due to the rusted over bolts.    Obstacle #1 down, many more to go!