Woodrow's 97 Green TJ Moderate Build
- Thread starter Woodrow
- Start date
Making Progress on the rear stretch. Cut the rear frame off today.
I’ve spent a lot of time on this metal. In ‘22 I stripped it all down and repainted it (https://wranglertjforum.com/threads/woodrows-97-green-tj-moderate-build.51602/post-1170420). Then in ‘24 I did the rear tuck (https://wranglertjforum.com/threads/woodrows-97-green-tj-moderate-build.51602/post-1579511). But that’s all over now:
Now I’ve done it. My wife walked out at this point and said “good luck and may the odds be ever in your favor”.
A couple of months ago, I salvaged a 2005 TJ frame in nice shape for this project. I’ve talked with @mrblaine a fair bit about it, and this is the plan I came up with in my head:
It was Blaine’s idea to turn the rear frame around to have the steep portion of the arch in back so there is still room for the gas filler tube to get to the tank. In doing this, the apex of the arch is pushed towards the rear and is also lower. That’s a problem if you retain the coil springs because you need the space under the arch for spring length. However with coilovers, you only need room for the axle tube to move up and there is plenty as you can see in the above pic which is 1” shy of full stuff. The up travel limit in the pic is the UCA brackets on the Savvy mini truss hitting the gas tank cross member.
That is a product of the stretch (the UCA brackets come up in front of the cross member with a stock wheelbase) and the crossmember will be replaced. A bonus is the lower arch height (blue arrow) brings more of the frame below the tub floor and makes it easier to mount a crossmember in front of the tank which also clears the UCA brackets with uptravel (yellow arrow). The green arrow is the frame cut. Once the frame is cut, the reversed frame rail looks like this:
The obvious issue is the back portion is too low (by 5”):
So cue the Cardboard Assisted Design (Sorry @sab, @Mike_H and all the other tech savvy members!):
However, old school technology still works OK:
The apex of the arch is now over the expected axle center and is low enough to place a crossmember for the body mounts. Also, there is enough flat section of the frame in the rear to allow the gas filler to get between the frame rail and tub.
The cut section behind the arch and the big holes will both be cut out and braced inboard to clear the coilovers so the welds are temporary. Too bad. I like the contour.
I’ve spent a lot of time on this metal. In ‘22 I stripped it all down and repainted it (https://wranglertjforum.com/threads/woodrows-97-green-tj-moderate-build.51602/post-1170420). Then in ‘24 I did the rear tuck (https://wranglertjforum.com/threads/woodrows-97-green-tj-moderate-build.51602/post-1579511). But that’s all over now:
Now I’ve done it. My wife walked out at this point and said “good luck and may the odds be ever in your favor”.
A couple of months ago, I salvaged a 2005 TJ frame in nice shape for this project. I’ve talked with @mrblaine a fair bit about it, and this is the plan I came up with in my head:
It was Blaine’s idea to turn the rear frame around to have the steep portion of the arch in back so there is still room for the gas filler tube to get to the tank. In doing this, the apex of the arch is pushed towards the rear and is also lower. That’s a problem if you retain the coil springs because you need the space under the arch for spring length. However with coilovers, you only need room for the axle tube to move up and there is plenty as you can see in the above pic which is 1” shy of full stuff. The up travel limit in the pic is the UCA brackets on the Savvy mini truss hitting the gas tank cross member.
That is a product of the stretch (the UCA brackets come up in front of the cross member with a stock wheelbase) and the crossmember will be replaced. A bonus is the lower arch height (blue arrow) brings more of the frame below the tub floor and makes it easier to mount a crossmember in front of the tank which also clears the UCA brackets with uptravel (yellow arrow). The green arrow is the frame cut. Once the frame is cut, the reversed frame rail looks like this:
The obvious issue is the back portion is too low (by 5”):
So cue the Cardboard Assisted Design (Sorry @sab, @Mike_H and all the other tech savvy members!):
However, old school technology still works OK:
The apex of the arch is now over the expected axle center and is low enough to place a crossmember for the body mounts. Also, there is enough flat section of the frame in the rear to allow the gas filler to get between the frame rail and tub.
The cut section behind the arch and the big holes will both be cut out and braced inboard to clear the coilovers so the welds are temporary. Too bad. I like the contour.
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That's pretty cool, Mike. Swapping the arch was a fantastic idea.
gasiorv
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Nice! I am not a big fan of keeping the tank below the jeep and in the rocks, but I know I am the anomaly and that you want the space for dogs, etc ...
Look fwd to seeing the coilover towers.
Look fwd to seeing the coilover towers.
Even if you did use CAD (Computer Assisted Design), there's always a place for CAD (Cardboard Assisted Design). It's tried-and-true, and you seldom encounter bugs in the software when you use it!
IDK, the organic hardware and software is not 100% reliable in my experience.
Those will be fun. I’ve been waiting for them to show up and they finally did a few days ago:
31” extended/19” compressed. I want every inch of that 12” working for me. I did some preliminary cycling of the axle with the 4-link brackets just clamped on the frame to help decide where to cut the frame off and how to rebuild it. The Savvy mid-arm set up really moves freely. Its nice.
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Might need to step it up to free range organic
I'll agree with you here and sometimes wish I'd opted for a fuel cell instead of a tank too. My biggest reason for NOT doing a fuel cell was the PITA of trying to refuel it when the top was on.
Mike,
Great job as always. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out for the fuel filler hoses. My hardest part I think was the added gussets I'd added to the shock towers.
The kids were home for Christmas and it was really nice but they have their lives and returned to them by the beginning of the week. Regardless, I had last week off and therefore, most of it was available for Jeep work. There were delays encountered but progress happened as well. In my last post, I cut the rear frame off and began fabricating the a new rear frame rail. That went pretty well so I figured the other side would be a cinch because I had a pattern. It was not as easy as I had hoped to make make a perfect replica but I did it.
Now is also a good time to go over what I’m doing with the back of the frame and why. Here are some pics of a new rail next to the old:
You can see the arch is not only farther back to keep it over the axle with the stretch, but also it is lower. Because the arch center is now moved back to roughly the level of the body mounts in front of the tank, fabrication of the new crossmember in that area will be easier because there is much more metal below the tub floor. As noted previously, the height of the arch can be lower with coilovers because the room between the frame and axle tube for the stock coil spring isn’t required. You can also see the rear end of the frame rail is a little longer and the length of flat section behind the arch is maintained. These both have to do with my goal of moving the tank back a little so that I can mount a decent sized tank in a stock-ish location instead of using a very small tank or a fuel cell in the bed.
The new rear cross member will also be the bumper and was fabricated out of 2”x3” rectangular 1/4” wall tubing. I angled up the underside of the ends and capped them. I also designed some 1” thick recovery points that embed into cut outs on the rear face of the bumper. This allows them to be welded all around on the back face and also get plug welded to the front face of the rectangular tubing.
Next up: Preparing the joints between the old and new frame sections. I used 4” long cards of 3/16” steel on each of the 4 inner surfaces of the frame. 2” of steel on either side of the joint with four 1/2” plug welds on each side of the joint for the wide cards and 2 on each side for the narrow cards. In total this amounts to 24 plug welds per joint plus the weld at the actual joint seam.
A note about frame quality: Here is one of the new frame rails after drilling the plug weld holes. Look how pristine the junkyard 05 frame is inside:
And look at my ‘97 frame in front of the cut. Not as pretty. I have done the Eastwood internal coat a couple of times in the past but there was some significant scale which was adherent enough to not rinse or blow out. The pic below is after running a crow bar down the inside surfaces a bunch of times to rub off the scale and then vacuum and blow out the loose stuff. It seems to get a lot better before the corner where you can see the first T-case skid bolt. I will re-coat inside when this is all done.
Once the 3 new pieces were ready and the original frame portion of the joint was prepared, it was time to assemble the new rear frame. First I welded the rear bumper to the frame rails making sure they were square and at the correct width between rails. This dimension was 37 3/4” - 37 7/8” depending upon where you measure on my old frame, which makes the point that the tolerances aren’t to the micron on these things. Sorry for that obtuse term@JMT
.
In preparation for joining the old and new, there was a ton of measuring both of the position of the new frame sections and the rear of the tub. Multiple people warned me beforehand that the tub and front portion of the frame must be well secured before cutting the rear. I am doing this on a lift and one concern is that removing a bunch of weight from the rear could make the Jeep front heavy and fall forward off the lift. To prevent that I put a pole jack under the front bumper and strapped the back of the rocker armor rails to the rear lift arms with 1000# capacity straps. I felt ( and still do feel) good about the stability of the jeep in the air. BUT what I didn’t pay enough attention to was supporting the rear of the tub so that it couldn’t droop once the frame with it 4 rear mounts were out. If you look at the back of the door gap in this picture closely, you can see widening at the top. Oops.
1
I guess I figured with the empty rear tub and the cage, it wouldn’t be so flexible. WRONG. And to be clear, I was warned this would happen. But however, no biggie. A pole jack under the back of the tub fixed the issue. Of course the question is how hard/high to push on the tub. I used several methods to figure this. 1) push until the resistance begins to sharply increase (lots wrong with this method). 2) Look at the door gaps (seems reasonable) 3) Laser line on top of the back of the tub matched up with body line at same level in front of door which continues to hood (I felt better about this one). And 4) mount the tub armor and see if it lines up with rockers. That one is interesting:
When I originally put on GR TJ pre-cut corner armor, I had to trim the bottom of the front to get it to be parallel with the rocker armor on both sides. Without the trim, it looked as if the back of the tub was sagging a degree or 2. Before I cut the frame, I checked the fit of the new GR blank armor (I did this mostly to see if the holes lined up and they did very nicely) and the same issue was present. I checked the bottom and top of the new armor it is parallel. The rocker armor is also parallel to the bottom of the door cut out so I concluded my almost 30 year old Jeep has a slightly saggy butt. After considering this for a while, I decided this was an opportunity for a restorative butt lift. So I cranked on the pole jack a little more until the bottom of the new tub armor was parallel to the rocker armor:
I also rechecked the laser and the door gaps as well as door opening/closing on both sides. All seemed good so I made some new perches for the rear body mounts:
Then I welded them on and bolted the body onto the mounts:
Finally, I welded the new rear frame to the front.
Now is also a good time to go over what I’m doing with the back of the frame and why. Here are some pics of a new rail next to the old:
You can see the arch is not only farther back to keep it over the axle with the stretch, but also it is lower. Because the arch center is now moved back to roughly the level of the body mounts in front of the tank, fabrication of the new crossmember in that area will be easier because there is much more metal below the tub floor. As noted previously, the height of the arch can be lower with coilovers because the room between the frame and axle tube for the stock coil spring isn’t required. You can also see the rear end of the frame rail is a little longer and the length of flat section behind the arch is maintained. These both have to do with my goal of moving the tank back a little so that I can mount a decent sized tank in a stock-ish location instead of using a very small tank or a fuel cell in the bed.
The new rear cross member will also be the bumper and was fabricated out of 2”x3” rectangular 1/4” wall tubing. I angled up the underside of the ends and capped them. I also designed some 1” thick recovery points that embed into cut outs on the rear face of the bumper. This allows them to be welded all around on the back face and also get plug welded to the front face of the rectangular tubing.
Next up: Preparing the joints between the old and new frame sections. I used 4” long cards of 3/16” steel on each of the 4 inner surfaces of the frame. 2” of steel on either side of the joint with four 1/2” plug welds on each side of the joint for the wide cards and 2 on each side for the narrow cards. In total this amounts to 24 plug welds per joint plus the weld at the actual joint seam.
A note about frame quality: Here is one of the new frame rails after drilling the plug weld holes. Look how pristine the junkyard 05 frame is inside:
And look at my ‘97 frame in front of the cut. Not as pretty. I have done the Eastwood internal coat a couple of times in the past but there was some significant scale which was adherent enough to not rinse or blow out. The pic below is after running a crow bar down the inside surfaces a bunch of times to rub off the scale and then vacuum and blow out the loose stuff. It seems to get a lot better before the corner where you can see the first T-case skid bolt. I will re-coat inside when this is all done.
Once the 3 new pieces were ready and the original frame portion of the joint was prepared, it was time to assemble the new rear frame. First I welded the rear bumper to the frame rails making sure they were square and at the correct width between rails. This dimension was 37 3/4” - 37 7/8” depending upon where you measure on my old frame, which makes the point that the tolerances aren’t to the micron on these things. Sorry for that obtuse term@JMT
.In preparation for joining the old and new, there was a ton of measuring both of the position of the new frame sections and the rear of the tub. Multiple people warned me beforehand that the tub and front portion of the frame must be well secured before cutting the rear. I am doing this on a lift and one concern is that removing a bunch of weight from the rear could make the Jeep front heavy and fall forward off the lift. To prevent that I put a pole jack under the front bumper and strapped the back of the rocker armor rails to the rear lift arms with 1000# capacity straps. I felt ( and still do feel) good about the stability of the jeep in the air. BUT what I didn’t pay enough attention to was supporting the rear of the tub so that it couldn’t droop once the frame with it 4 rear mounts were out. If you look at the back of the door gap in this picture closely, you can see widening at the top. Oops.
I guess I figured with the empty rear tub and the cage, it wouldn’t be so flexible. WRONG. And to be clear, I was warned this would happen. But however, no biggie. A pole jack under the back of the tub fixed the issue. Of course the question is how hard/high to push on the tub. I used several methods to figure this. 1) push until the resistance begins to sharply increase (lots wrong with this method). 2) Look at the door gaps (seems reasonable) 3) Laser line on top of the back of the tub matched up with body line at same level in front of door which continues to hood (I felt better about this one). And 4) mount the tub armor and see if it lines up with rockers. That one is interesting:
When I originally put on GR TJ pre-cut corner armor, I had to trim the bottom of the front to get it to be parallel with the rocker armor on both sides. Without the trim, it looked as if the back of the tub was sagging a degree or 2. Before I cut the frame, I checked the fit of the new GR blank armor (I did this mostly to see if the holes lined up and they did very nicely) and the same issue was present. I checked the bottom and top of the new armor it is parallel. The rocker armor is also parallel to the bottom of the door cut out so I concluded my almost 30 year old Jeep has a slightly saggy butt. After considering this for a while, I decided this was an opportunity for a restorative butt lift. So I cranked on the pole jack a little more until the bottom of the new tub armor was parallel to the rocker armor:
I also rechecked the laser and the door gaps as well as door opening/closing on both sides. All seemed good so I made some new perches for the rear body mounts:
Then I welded them on and bolted the body onto the mounts:
Finally, I welded the new rear frame to the front.
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The kids were home for Christmas and it was really nice but they have their lives and returned to them by the beginning of the week. Regardless, I had last week off and therefore, most of it was available for Jeep work. There were delays encountered but progress happened as well. In my last post, I cut the rear frame off and began fabricating the a new rear frame rail. That went pretty well so I figured the other side would be a cinch because I had a pattern. It was not as easy as I had hoped to make make a perfect replica but I did it.
View attachment 664585
Now is also a good time to go over what I’m doing with the back of the frame and why. Here are some pics of a new rail next to the old:
View attachment 664580View attachment 664579View attachment 664578
You can see the arch is not only farther back to keep it over the axle with the stretch, but also it is lower. Because the arch center is now moved back to roughly the level of the body mounts in front of the tank, fabrication of the new crossmember in that area will be easier because there is much more metal below the tub floor. As noted previously, the height of the arch can be lower with coilovers because the room between the frame and axle tube for the stock coil spring isn’t required. You can also see the rear end of the frame rail is a little longer and the length of flat section behind the arch is maintained. These both have to do with my goal of moving the tank back a little so that I can mount a decent sized tank in a stock-ish location instead of using a very small tank or a fuel cell in the bed.
The new rear cross member will also be the bumper and was fabricated out of 2”x3” rectangular 1/4” wall tubing. I angled up the underside of the ends and capped them. I also designed some 1” thick recovery points that embed into cut outs on the rear face of the bumper. This allows them to be welded all around on the back face and also get plug welded to the front face of the rectangular tubing.
View attachment 664590View attachment 664591View attachment 664592
Next up: Preparing the joints between the old and new frame sections. I used 4” long cards of 3/16” steel on each of the 4 inner surfaces of the frame. 2” of steel on either side of the joint with four 1/2” plug welds on each side of the joint for the wide cards and 2 on each side for the narrow cards. In total this amounts to 24 plug welds per joint plus the weld at the actual joint seam.
View attachment 664593
A note about frame quality: Here is one of the new frame rails after drilling the plug weld holes. Look how pristine the junkyard 05 frame is inside:
View attachment 664584
And look at my ‘97 frame in front of the cut. Not as pretty. I have done the Eastwood internal coat a couple of times in the past but there was some significant scale which was adherent enough to not rinse or blow out. The pic below is after running a crow bar down the inside surfaces a bunch of times to rub off the scale and then vacuum and blow out the loose stuff. It seems to get a lot better before the corner where you can see the first T-case skid bolt. I will re-coat inside when this is all done.
View attachment 664581
Once the 3 new pieces were ready and the original frame portion of the joint was prepared, it was time to assemble the new rear frame. First I welded the rear bumper to the frame rails making sure they were square and at the correct width between rails. This dimension was 37 3/4” - 37 7/8” depending upon where you measure on my old frame, which makes the point that the tolerances aren’t to the micron on these things. Sorry for that obtuse term@JMT
View attachment 664595View attachment 664597View attachment 664599
In preparation for joining the old and new, there was a ton of measuring both of the position of the new frame sections and the rear of the tub. Multiple people warned me beforehand that the tub and front portion of the frame must be well secured before cutting the rear. I am doing this on a lift and one concern is that removing a bunch of weight from the rear could make the Jeep front heavy and fall forward off the lift. To prevent that I put a pole jack under the front bumper and strapped the back of the rocker armor rails to the rear lift arms with 1000# capacity straps. I felt ( and still do feel) good about the stability of the jeep in the air. BUT what I didn’t pay enough attention to was supporting the rear of the tub so that it couldn’t droop once the frame with it 4 rear mounts were out. If you look at the back of the door gap in this picture closely, you can see widening at the top. Oops.
View attachment 6645861
I guess I figured with the empty rear tub and the cage, it wouldn’t be so flexible. WRONG. And to be clear, I was warned this would happen. But however, no biggie. A pole jack under the back of the tub fixed the issue. Of course the question is how hard/high to push on the tub. I used several methods to figure this. 1) push until the resistance begins to sharply increase (lots wrong with this method). 2) Look at the door gaps (seems reasonable) 3) Laser line on top of the back of the tub matched up with body line at same level in front of door which continues to hood (I felt better about this one). And 4) mount the tub armor and see if it lines up with rockers. That one is interesting:
When I originally put on GR TJ pre-cut corner armor, I had to trim the bottom of the front to get it to be parallel with the rocker armor on both sides. Without the trim, it looked as if the back of the tub was sagging a degree or 2. Before I cut the frame, I checked the fit of the new GR blank armor (I did this mostly to see if the holes lined up and they did very nicely) and the same issue was present. I checked the bottom and top of the new armor it is parallel. The rocker armor is also parallel to the bottom of the door cut out so I concluded my almost 30 year old Jeep has a slightly saggy butt. After considering this for a while, I decided this was an opportunity for a restorative butt lift. So I cranked on the pole jack a little more until the bottom of the new tub armor was parallel to the rocker armor:
View attachment 664583View attachment 664582
I also rechecked the laser and the door gaps as well as door opening/closing on both sides. All seemed good so I made some new perches for the rear body mounts:
View attachment 664596
Then I welded them on and bolted the body onto the mounts:
View attachment 664589View attachment 664598
Finally, I welded the new rear frame to the front.
View attachment 664587
View attachment 664587
View attachment 664588
Looks great Mike!
I like this a lot. Well done sir. I have more ideas rumbling around in my head now thanks, lol.
Great work, Mike. You are really upping your fab game.
He's a rockstar by far... Sure has done some nice mods to his Jeep... And I was honored to get to ride right seat with him this year in Moab.
Thank you. Admittedly, aiming to increase my fabrication skills is a low bar, but watching guys like you is certainly an inspiration to do better.
Wow! Really nice work. I think the hardest part is committing to the project and boy did you ever do just that!
Ha ha. Yep, no going back now!
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