Yeah, exhaust exits right in front of the rear wheels. I'll likely just take a sawzall to them and cut them so they just dump out underneath once I figure out sliders.
Yeah, exhaust exits right in front of the rear wheels. I'll likely just take a sawzall to them and cut them so they just dump out underneath once I figure out sliders.
Testing clearances with new tires.
Just rubbed the steps climbing this.
Got hung up in the snow pretty easily. Going to need to go bigger!
You take that back!
speedkills (May 9th, 2021)
I do like me some Jeep clones. Some would call them rip-offs, I call them tributes.
Starting in on putting a steel winch bumper on. The stock bumper has an oil cooler right where I would want to put a winch. While I'm at it I'm swapping the grill out for one from the older models, gives my G more of the look I fell in love with when I was younger, I'm not a fan of the newer fancier grills.
Now I can see what I'm working with.
Then I ran into an unexpected issue, the bumper doesn't fit, it's too long on one side. They must have changed where they mounted the steering rack to the frame over the years, my new bumper has the same length frame mounts and same spacing bolt holes on both sides but on my G they are different. Had to lop a couple of inches off of one side of the bumper frame ears and then tap a new hole for the spacing of my G.
Not the cleanest cut ever, but it fits now. I ended up grinding it down a bit straighter after this pic.
Main frame of the bumper mounted up, did a quick test fit of the oil cooler and it might just fit below the winch like this. If not I'll pick up two smaller oil coolers and mount them on the left and right of the winch.
And then I ran out of steam. Hopefully I get this together tomorrow for the slaughterhouse run Sunday, if not I'll bring my Range Rover.
As long as it fits, it looks great
The cooler hanging down was actually two coolers stuck together, one is a transmission cooler, the other has part number pointing to a description of "sub-radiator" and it has coolant in it, was in a hurry today so didn't have time to trace the hoses. I wonder if it's actually just a bit of extra cooling vs the stock radiator size since it's supercharged or if maybe it's an intercooler? Either way, splitting them reduced their height so after making a few new brackets I was able to mount them really cleanly in the new bumper.
I ended up removing the flip up license plate holder/winch cover for now, the hinges it came with were super cheesy and it made way too much noise. Will have to figure out a better solution for that later. For now, since I'm tired of posting pics of my G in my garage, but too lazy to actually go anywhere, here's a driveway pic to change things up.
I'm liking the older style grill, had to do a little cutting to it to get it to fit well but overall I prefer it, not having those three wide chrome bars. I do need to find some sort of mesh to put behind the Merc emblem though, looks a bit unfinished just looking straight into the radiator and some cooling pipe.
TDash (May 29th, 2021)
The old grill looks killer!
Yeah it looks great and I agree about some kind of mesh will hide the radiator/cooling pipe
I like the 'new' look!
That looks awesome.
No more side pipes to get crushed by the rocks. This mod I'm actually on the fence about keeping vs just taking a sawzall to my stock exhaust. This muffler also tucks up and out of the way better than my stock unit, but it is noisier than I would have liked. I'll try it out for a few weeks and make up my mind.
Installed my winch, fairlead, and flip up license plate mount. Haven't gotten around to wiring it yet but my current plan is to hide the winch control unit in the passenger side of the bumper.
Wow that bumper looks great.