Project Double-Duty TJ

Flat Fendered Front, Comp Cut Rear, Avalanche Crusher Corners & LED Lighting.

In order to make room for 40" MTR tires and a stretched wheelbase, Project Double Duty TJ is undergoing some serious sheetmetal removal. Follow along below as we get down to business...

Here's our TJ before we broke out the cutting tools. You can see the turn signal lights in the front fenders and the side marker lights in the flares...

...and here's Project DD after some healthy trimming. We cut the front fenders off above the turn signal lights, trimmed the flares, installed 4" LED lights in the grill (CJ style) and 2" round marker lights in the hood. Lot's more room for those big meats! No, we're not trying to pull a fast one- we sold our geared & locked axles, so our TJ is rolling around on 225-75-15's until we can install our 1 ton drivetrain.

The rear section has been competition cut and is ready for our Crusher Corners from Poison Spyder Customs.

Here's a glimpse of the all new LED lights from ASL. We started with LED's from another company, which had 56 LED's per light. They were extremely bright. The new LED's have 17 Hewlett-Packard LED's per light and a patented lens and reflector design. These are high quality LED's with an unlimited lifetime warranty. Amazingly, they are even brighter than the lights we had before! We like the ASL line so much, we decided to add them to our product line. They are available in many different sizes and colors. More on these in the near future. Call for pricing and info...


Here's the rear section after the comp cut. All the holes are drilled for the Crusher Corners from Poison Spyder customs. That's a lot of metal to remove from a jeep. Definitely not for the weak hearted!		Here's a rear shot of Project DD with the cutting done, taillights mocked into place, the outer frame extension cut-off and rearward body mounts relocated inboard. We fabbed a temporary set of shock mounts for the occasional trip to the post office. The lower tailgate hinge you see in this photo is a passenger side lower TJ door hinge. We'll be using 2 sets of these for our tailgate hinges, after some modifications.		Our Crusher Corners from Poison Spyder Customs are painted to match and ready to bolt on. These puppies are made from 3/16" steel plate. They'll strengthen our now anemic side panels substantially. We'll be bolting on a set of Rocker Knockers from PSC as well.

Here's a taste of things to come. We rolled one of the rear wheels out and set it in place at approximately where it will reside when it's all over. We still need to install our Tera CRD60R axle and new suspension out back. We'll also need to cut the rearward section of the front fenders to make more room for those big meats! The Poison Spyder Customs Rocker Knockers are bolted in place as well.

Here's a front shot of our jeep. The Dynatrac 60 is in place. We bolted up the stock and Rubicon Express steering and trackbar components temporarily to move it around the shop. Project DD will be getting an all new HD high steer set-up and trackbar soon.

Overall track width is 81 inches.

We had to cut a healthy amount of metal from the front fenders as well to get the big 40" tires to fit.

We'll rebuild the inner fender structure to seal it all back up again.

Here's a shot of the TJ passenger side lower door hinges that will be used for tailgate hinges. (The stock hinges wouldn't work after the comp cut in the rear, since there's nowhere to mount the lower hinge.) Welding a 3/16" plate to the back of the hinges allowed us to space them out to match the 3/16" Crusher Corners from Poison Spyder Customs and also fill the factory holes that were there.

After redrilling the hinges to match up with the factory tailgate holes and some grinding and smoothing, we mounted them up for a test fit. They work flawlessly! Since they were designed to hold the weight of a full steel factory door, they'll be plenty strong enough for our tailgate. Operation is very smooth and tight.

The fit is excellent. Now we'll take them off again and do the finishing touches and paint work. They'll look like they came from the factory this way.

Some trail only rigs just dispose of the tailgate. We want to keep our tailgate in order to utilize a full soft top at times. We've seen some people use CJ hinges on a comp cut rear, but that requires some extensive modifications to the latch mechanisms, etc. With our gas tank raised up in the rear, this wouldn't be fun. The TJ door hinges will make a very clean functional set-up when finished and we can still utilize the factory tailgate latch. We're surprised we haven't seen this done before.

Stay tuned as we finish up our TJ's bodywork. More pics to come...