Parts Jeep Trail Build

This weekend was consumed with sweating the details, getting everything to fit. But before just for fun, I took a buffer to the old paint on one of the doors to try & get a shine out of it. Much to my surprise it shined up a bit. The passenger door and the right hinge pillar got 1 ½” of metal trimmed from the bottom to clear the shovel.

Like most of the jeep, there were more unneeded holes here to weld up that I left the first go around. I thought some of them could be reused, but most of the existing holes didn’t line up anymore so I weldied them closed and started over. Stuff will fit better this way.

I found a new hinge for the doors at the local steel yard. 

The windshield latches were always a mess and were previously bent flat to attach to a flat piece of sheet metal instead of fitting to the round lower tube, so both of these needed a lot of attention. If the windshield would see a lot of up and down action I would just replace them but since that will rarely happen, I straightened them enough to latch. I also felt brave enough to drill holes through the hardtop for the wiper motors. The wipers used to be located below the glass in the sheet metal panel. I never liked this plus it would interfere with the saw storage, so they got put back up on the top of the windshield frame. I’ll have to buy a pair of the electric wiper motors for this new location as the shafts on the old ones are too short now.

Yes Greaser, fitting, sorting, whatever you want to call it- it’s done. Still waiting on a couple of items to drill holes for and test fit before blowing it all apart again to start the meticulous process of paint prep. This is “time to make the doughnuts” work for me as it’s the same process over and over until it’s ready for final finish or I’m truly sick of doing it. I’m pretty much “all or nothing” when it comes to painting and will try to make it look as good as possible when spending this amount of time and money doing it.

The first scratch or dent will likely make me cry, but after that passes it won’t be new anymore and then the jeep will be much more fun after. The same thing happened with the first brand-new dirt bike I bought that I crashed on some wet, mossy pavement and broke some plastic and tore the seat- after that, it got the wheels rode off of it!