After about 6 months or so of doing some mud runs and a lot of trails, I decided it was a ton more fun on the trails than in the mud and after knocking out one of the big side glasses at Southern Missouri Offroad Ranch in Seymour Mo, I decided that things weren't the way I liked em' anyway so I decided to do some major surgery on her for the winter.
The wheel base was a little too short for the trails I was running and the raduis arms I bent and added on to weren't holding up, the panhard bar was causing problems and the James Duff front coils wouldn't stay straight at all, I had them bent so far out of shape they looked like they had been used as one of thos kiddie things at the park that you bounce around on, except with a 500lb man on them.
So I did the only thing any body with sense would...... I cut her up!
First went the back cab half, then I took 16" out of the floor of the remaining bed and doved the rear body.
Next was the wheelbase issue I needed longer and I needed a little bit lower gear ratio than the 5.13's for when I was wanting to crawl. So I ordered a doubler kit from offroad design and put an NP203 in front of my 205 with triple sticks. That made my driveshaft angle in the front a whole lot better but worse in the rear. I also did away with the panhard bar and the F'd up radius arms and four linked the frontend.
I wanted to get my approach angle better too so I wanted to move the frontend forward and get my big winch bumper and winch tucked back further. I moved the front forwards about 6" and took the radiator out so I could put the winch under the grill. When I moved the frontend foward I put on my double cylinders for the full hydo. steering, and I put in 4340 Chromoly axles with superjoints.
I then proceeded to the rear where I moved the rearend back about 15", so I had to cut the bed side up. When I moved the fronend forward I chand the James Duff coils out for some 8" lift XJ coils, they work a lot better for my application, they hold up the heavy V8 but still flex really well.
Since I had to cut the bedside back to improve the appearance I skinned out some longbed ranger bedsides and welded them on to the exsisting body.
I then needed to address the radiator, since I took it out of the front I decided to put ot in the rear and make protection around it by adding on to the exo-cage I already made. Also the gas tank had taken a real beating and I put the rearend under it so when I got to much liquid courage and jumped it it would hit the tank so I installed a fuel cell and cut the floor and put it half up in the floor and half sticking out the bottom.
Next I wanted some bar doors do I fabricated some out of tubing to go along with our CreepyCrawlers theme....... spider webs.
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I kept the original doors and I made both the bar doors and the hard doors where I could pin them on and off in about 1 min.