replacing carpet padding -safety question

[gba88]

This may be a stupid question but... I decided to pull up all of the carpet, address any rust, tear out the factory felt insulation and then replace it with an alternate sound deadening, water resistant foam padding.

All was going well until I came to the passenger side of the vehicle...it's a 99 with the heatshield under the rear passenger floor. When I pulled the carpet on that side there was an additional layer of white insulation that ran along the path of the exhaust pipe. So my question is would it had been safe to have torn out the "important looking" (is if fireproof or something?) additional white insulating layer? I *really* wanted to remove ALL of the grey felt stuff but got a little hesitant at that point. Please post if you have any info, Thanks!

 

[Eagle]

It's thermal insulation and it's there for a reason. At the recent Mohawk Madness event (North Atlantic Chapter), the group stopped for a map check and someone looked into another guy's XJ and said "Why is there smoke coming up from the floor of your Jeep?"

Ripped up carpet to find that the heat of low-speed crawling had started the carpet padding smouldering. This was a mid-90s XJ and did not have the extra heat shielding the new ones have. Now you know why they added it.

About a week later, someone else posted the exact same problem on another trail ride.

 

[gba88]

Hmm.... ok that's what I thought so it was probably a good thing that I didn't tear it out then. Thanks for the info!

 

[DrMoab]

I put a spintech muffler on my jeep and had that same problem with the carpet catching on fire. Luckly the pad just smoldered and didn't burn the stupid thing to the ground...I bet that would be hard fire to put out if you didn't know what it was or where it started...Not to mention its right under my one year olds feet.