Eric's ZJ Build

[Bradman]

glad to see your hanging in there after the arse load of damage you took to that rig of yours. 
Hopefully won't take too much to get you back together for  the next run.

[Technohead]

And now the fix. But first a few more pics of the damage. Here's a good shot of the stub shaft clearly showing where the yoke yielded:



The broken windshield. Fender bent back into the corner:



And the rear door. This was the first damage of the day:



Lower ball joint partially pressed back in on the trail. I drove out with it like this:



And now to the repairs. Here's the replacement Moog ball joints. I did both sides:



Alloy axle shafts and Spicer 5-760x u-joints:





Thanks to club member Jeff for owning a real ball joint press. I can't imagine doing this job without it:



A good shot of where the knuckle got peened when the yoke snapped. This is why we could not get the ball joint all the way back in on the trail:



One of my favorite tools of all time comes to the rescue again:



Going back together:





Torquing the "spindle" nuts. Interestingly, the nuts were barely finger tight when when I took them off despite torquing them to 180 ft-lbs when I installed them last summer. Strange! Need to check them this time. Snapped my expensive torque wrench but the back-up came through:





Drank alot of these along the way:



All back together and shiny:



Next step is the body work. Here's the parts vehicle (thanks to John!):



Now lets git-r-done:

[jps4jeep]

Well, your doing it right... sure looks like it will buff out.

[Twisty]

The best upgrade you can do to a D30 is to throw it in the dirt, and get a kingpin axle under there.   


Seriously though, I'm glad to see that you got out of the woods, and are repairing the Jeep to take it out again!

[Krome]

He should buy jeepgods axle

[Technohead]

Time for an update. Got the body back in shape. More-or-less. Still need a windshield:







Went back to get my revenge. The washed out hill is alot more washed out compared to when we were there in March:

[Technohead]

I got tired of waiting for Trxus to become available again and picked up some Maxxis Bighorns a few weeks ago:





Paid $190 a tire at Metro in Johnston,RI which is about $80 less than I was looking at for the Swampers. This is the tirst time in over 20 years that I've run something besides Swampers or BFG's on a trail rig.  Let's see how it goes. . .

I also started my slider build. As you can see its not a moment too soon because the original rockers have seen better days:



The basic structure is 4"x4"x3/16" wall tubing. Whats left of the original rockers will be cut out and the new rockers will be tied into the A/B/C pillars. They will also be tied into the uniframe to help resist side loading:





Here's what can (will!) happen to shocks if you don't run limit straps on a link suspension:



Limit straps have been on the TODO list but I kept putting them off. The crazy thing is I just replaced the shocks and will not have time to fit limit straps before the Fall Crawl next weekend. Maybe I will just remove the shocks and wheel without them:



 

[Mitch]

I have 35" bighorns. Not a lot of trail time with them but they did great so far. I seem to be melting them on the road - I drive hiway a lot! And my minispool and non properly working aussie love eating them! But I can go 90 mph easy!

[jps4jeep]

likey the sliders

[Technohead]

Its been slow going but I finally made some progress on the slider build.

With the rails done the next stage of the project was cutting off the old rockers. The design calls for tieing directly into the pillars so I carefully cut out the old material which revealed solid structure for the a-b pillars but nothing much for the c-pillar.

Here's the b-pillar structure:



And here's the a-pillar structure. There was quite a bit of rust on the passengers side (shown). Not so bad on the drivers side. The sliders will also tie into that channel running under the floorboards to the frame:



The third stage of the project was making some mounting brackets. Here I used 4" wide by 1/8" thick sheet welded into an "angle iron". These brackets are welded to the pillars and the unibody structure as shown in the photos below. Lots of care was taken when fitting these brackets so that the sliders would line up perfectly. This was a real PITA but well worth the effort. The photos also show how I peeled back the remaining rocker panel metal for access. In the end I will fold this metal back into place and stitch-weld it directly to the slider rails.

Photo showing how the a-pillar bracket was attached. You can also see the other two brackets toward the rear:



Photo showing how the b-pillar bracket was attached. I used a similar bracket for the c-pillar area but since there was no pillar structure back there I could only weld onto what remained of the old rockers (i.e. similar to the vertical welds show here):



With the brackets fitted it was then a simple matter to hoist the rails into place and burn them on. The following photos show how the rails were attached to the top edge of the brackets. The same was done on the bottom edge of the brackets:





And this is where I stand today:



The remaining work includes folding the sheet metal down and stitch-welding it to the rails then some prep/seam sealer before coating the whole thing with Herculiner.

These things are incredibly strong. I can lift the whole side of the vehicle off the ground with a high-lift and there is zero deflection.

[Twisty]

I like what you're doing.  

[Axle]

 

[Technohead]

Finished up the sliders (except for a little Herc):



And started on a belly skid:

[jps4jeep]

looks good, whats the plate material?

[Technohead]

3/16" hot roll