Joined the RedTJ club... Kinda

I used plastic razor/scraper blades. It worked well except on the places where they were degraded the worst.

ok, i will have to look into those. i hate the decals, i remember when my stepdad put them on the rockers and hood, now i am cursing him for them. ahahahahaha

Get someone to buff it for you with a high speed buffer. A wool pad will eat them right off.

I took a little trip upstate last Wednesday and finally got a matching spare (2 33" tires will fit in the trunk of a Park Avenue by the way).



Then I headed a little farther north and picked up a set of new in box Bestop 2 piece soft doors that the guy bought for his daughter but she had a YJ not a TJ. I also ordered the Bestop mirror brackets for soft doors. If I have time to mess with it tomorrow, I'll get these installed and adjusted.

I had high expectations for today...



I started by finishing up my on board air setup. I bought the ARB Inflator kit when I did the lockers. To have more capacity, I mounted a 1 gallon Viair tank under the floor. I wanted to be able to cut the tank out of the system if I was just using the lockers quickly, or fill the tank on trips, so I came up with this:



Air hose connection on end, cutoff valve to tank, and the ARB pressure switch.



Then all I got to was the front shocks... I think the arms and rear shocks will wait until I have another set of hands and a lift. I did have a pretty cute helper. She's already trying to drive the Jeep.

After working most of the day yesterday organizing the garage:


One small project done today... Put mirrors on my Bestop soft doors using their mirror brackets.

I updated the first post and tried to list out everything that been done over the past 2 years, and what's to come. I wanted to have a list of everything in one place.

Once again, I have high expectations for the holiday weekend. In addition to the control arms that still haven't been installed, I also have UCF skids, body lift, and motor mount lift that I want to get done before uwharrie... I got the skids primed tonight, hopefully paint tomorrow, and start install friday.

In preparation, the Jeep got its annual automatic car wash this morning.

Once again, my high expectations were not met... I decided not to try to do the skids, body lift, etc. in the short time I had in case I ran into any issues and didn't have time to fix them. So, I remote mounted the winch solenoid and finished my in cab controls instead. It looks much cleaner and will get some more air into the radiator. I plan to eventually replace the stock fogs with a low profile light bar.

What kinda mileage you getting with this? Any problems from the auto?

Mileage? What's that? It does 14-15. Trans shifts funny sometimes but from what I've heard that's normal for these.

On the way home from Uwharrie and the next day to and from work the front CV started making noise, as Brooks called it "the angry Sparrows". So, I decided to go ahead and get a replacement while the original one was still a serviceable spare.

Ready for some snow now! That thing looks fresh, mine got sandpapered at 33 my first trip out with it.

Before:

After:

Saturday I got the body lift and MML done. The body lift went very smoothly. The most time consuming part was removing and reinstalling the frame tie in brackets for the rear bumper to get access to the rear body mount bolts. The passenger side motor mount was easy. I had to remove the bracket from the block on the driver side because the through bolt hit the power steering pump, so that took a while. It took about 5 hours by myself. Dad came over and helped align the drivers side mount to get the bolt through.

Today I did the UCF skid. One of the skid bolts spun the insert... If that wouldn't have happened this would have been pretty easy. Luckily I was able to cut the head off the bolt, drop the pan, weld the insert to the bottom of the frame, weld a nut to what was left of the bolt, and get it out.

I also tacked the other 5 inserts while the pan was down so this won't happen again...


The factory skid gave about 12.5 inches ground clearance. The UCF is about 14.75. I didn't touch the tcase linkage and everything works fine. My front driveline vibes got better (liveable) but the rear got worse (noticeable). Hopefully the adjustable rear arms will be able to fix that.

awesome ground clearance improvement! glad you got the skid bolt out.

I've been thinking about the rear driveline vibes and it's pretty obvious why. I lifted the body and engine 1", but the transfer case came up 2" or more. The studs on the factory trans mount were damaged because they stick through the factory skid, so I was only able to get 3 nuts back on. I'm thinking about ordering the UCF Lopro mount to bring the trans back down an inch and have everything in line again. UCF says you have to clearance the leading edge of the skid to clear a 42RLE though.

Anyone used or seen that mount used?

I think mason used that mount? but he does not have an auto.

Yeah I got the lopro mount.. Yes it is very easy to install as it bolts right in. If I were to do it again though I would definitely weld in a cross member. It may not be as bad for an auto, but the mount moves a little bit and you feel a good bit more vibrations.

I got a response back from UCF saying that the rolled edge of the pan has to be cut almost completely out under the trans pan to fit a lopro with 42RLE, but the engine skid reinforces that area. Guess I'll take a look at it tonight and decide.

Went ahead and ordered the lopro to try to get it here this weekend...