I've been working on this since about January. It used to belong to colter, I inherited it with a cracked flywheel and a black fender and door. After fixing those things, I threw on some 33's and wheeled uwharrie a couple times.




My plan all along was a solid axle swap and rear leaf conversion.





Cutting the IFS and rear coil suspension was extremely time consuming. We used a 7 inch grinder with cutoff wheels combined with a sawzall. We finished the frame rails with a combination of 4 and 7 inch grinding wheels.



Thanks to Matt (Jeepman) for welding my front hanger. After that I bought a Lincoln Pro Mig 175 to finish the job. Of course I ran into little problems along the way. I ended up kicking the rear out about 3 inches, so I had to have my rear driveshaft retubed at Fleetpride. I'm in the process of building a front shaft out of tri-lobe agricultural shaft tubing. I gained about 6 inches of wheelbase, which should work really well.



This is on 38x12.50 TSL's. I really don't care for them, the bias ply part anyway. I want to step down to a 37" radial, MTR or Xterrain probably. I'll take $700 for the tires if anyone wants them. They've got great tread left and only minor cuts.

My first driving impressions were both good and bad. It has an shimmy at 40 mph that will probably be corrected by an alignment and some tamer tires. I was impressed with its ability to crawl, its an automatic. I was afraid I'd be burning it up in short order, but seems to roll up steep hills fairly well, better than a comparable 5-speed version. I can't wait to start wheeling it!

[Edited on May 16, 2006 at 6:49 PM. Reason : .]

5/16/2006 6:48:21 PM

Well done....awesome result

5/16/2006 7:06:22 PM

hell yeah man, nice ride

the automatic is probably better. wheelin with a manual get's old from the little experience i've had and you won't go through clutches like crazy

5/16/2006 7:10:17 PM

looks awesome man! now you need some bumpers

5/16/2006 7:13:37 PM

i dont know a lot of what you just wrote, but it looks good and should be a lot of fun times ahead, nice job

5/16/2006 7:51:24 PM

I'm out of $$ for this project right now. I've got three sets of tires to sell and buy new tires, then bumpers. I have some sliders sitting my garage waiting to be welded on.

5/17/2006 9:58:39 AM

sweet man! I'm glad it worked out for you.

5/18/2006 7:36:32 PM