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Pat Harrison photos
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Pat Harrison photos
Armour Your Jeep
A step bit is your friend when drilling into thin sheet metal.
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Pat Harrison photos
Armour Your Jeep
Frame mounted rocker armor is your best bet for protection.
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Pat Harrison photos
Armour Your Jeep
A heavy-duty cross member adds strength and durability to handle a lot of hits.
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Pat Harrison photos
Armour Your Jeep
Heavy-duty replacement diff cover.
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Pat Harrison photos
Armour Your Jeep
In a nod to weight saving, my next four skid plates will be aluminum.
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Pat Harrison photos
Armour Your Jeep
Steel corner armour and high-end metal fender flares will take a lot of abuse.
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Pat Harrison photos
Armour Your Jeep
You can't really have too much protection.
Story and photos by Pat Harrison
As we picked our way through a boulder strewn section of an Off-Road Vehicle Park in Washington State, some of the on-lookers who had parked their quads to watch the six Jeeps descend, were wincing at the sounds coming from under my rig as I passed. I had my window down and could hear the metal on rock myself as well as a comment that made me chuckle: "The guy is smiling while he does that to his Jeep?" I offered our helmeted onlookers an explanation by saying "Hey it's all good! Those are all skid plates taking the abuse and leaving paint behind on the rocks." What I got back was a puzzled look and a reply, which requires censoring for publication. "Holy $&@+ you must have a $¥#£ load of skid plates under that thing then!" I crawled away one violent lurch at a time thinking yeah, I kind of do, and smiled.
How much is a lot? Would thirteen different skids be too much? I run steel bumpers front and rear, rock sliders, small front control arm skids, gas tank, cross member, oil pan, trans case, EVAP canister, rocker armour, gusseted metal fender flares and both diffs have slider style skids. Too much for you? Well depending on what you do with your Jeep it may be but I tend to follow some enthusiastic characters whenever I can, so most of mine have taken a beating and have paid for themselves. Truth be known, if you have a decent amount of lift and tires in the 35-in. range, you have done yourself a huge favour in ground obstacle avoidance and with a good spotter can avoid carnage on all but the roughest of trails. It may come down to which route you chose to go when building a trail ready rig.
Let's say you have listened to those that advocate taking your time with your build and getting to know the stock capabilities of your Jeep before deciding how much lift you need and what size tires to run. If that's your plan then you will want to put a few armour items on the top of your list and consider your trail choices a little more carefully until you add that ground clearance.
Use the stock skid plates until they resemble a cheese grater that survived a round with one of those metal-munching machines down at the recycling depot. Definitely, get that JK EVAP canister covered or moved and give some thought to both diff covers especially if you are in a long wheelbase four door JK. I prefer the slider style cover for the diffs and definitely like the version for the rear that also covers the spinning u-joint at the end of the rear drive shaft. AEV and Rancho both make excellent examples of these. These can save you some very expensive repair bills. The rockers on your low rider will cave in like an empty beer can at a college frat party when the ground comes up to give them a little love terra firma style. If you are running stock JK step boards, Mother Earth will take care of them, leaving you with gaping holes in the plastic and distorted sheet metal where they are attached. The OEM Rubicon units are better but still attach through the sheet metal only and will get pushed right up into your rocker panels if you come down hard on them. Look for aftermarket models that attach to the frame for strength and preferably don't use up too much precious ground clearance in the process.
Moving up to the bodylines, we find that the manufacturer’s weight savings on the JKs was a sheet metal thickness resembling that beer can mentioned earlier. If you are going to be in the rocks or the trees, which is pretty much all off-road, then you are going to dent, gouge, crease and generally cave in every one of your quarter panels sooner or later. You can fight back with some of the myriad of armour made these days by dozens of different companies producing everything from body armour to metal fender flares. A word of advice about each though; if you are going to drill into that thin sheet metal and install nutserts to attach your nifty new armour pieces, take your time. Use a multi-bit whenever possible and paint every damned one of the holes thoroughly before bolting more weight onto your rig.
Now when it comes to replacing those torn off stock plastic fender flares, you have basically three choices that all provide increase clearance in the wheel wells for your tires to flex upwards. You can literally run 37-in. tires on a 2 ½-in. lift on a JK. In the $600 range, you can find plastic high clearance fender flares that are designed to function much like the OEM flares, in that they will fold up or tear off before doing damage to your tub sheet metal if you are lucky. Not the end of the world as they usually go right back on with some replacement clips where needed. Similarly or slightly higher priced metal fender flares are available, which are for the budget minded but lack any real strength and attach pretty much just through the fender sheet metal. This can present a problem when you get your four door JK stuck between the same two trees your TJ driving pal just slipped through with ease. Now the contact stresses that would have torn those plastic ones off are transferred straight into your Bud Light sheet metal and you are booking a visit to the local body shop. Stay away from full contact with rocks and avoid tree sex, as we call it out here on the “wet” coast, if you are running these. Stepping up to the $1000-$1500 range a set of four fully gusseted and braced fender flares, gets you capable of taking a load as they are tied into the sub-frame to transfer the stress to areas that can take it. Heck these are strong enough for you to stand on to watch your daughters high school marching band in the May Day parade if they'll let you park your menacing off-road beast close enough. Whichever set of aftermarket fender flares you go with, know their limitations so you can navigate accordingly when the going gets rough.
Aftermarket bumpers could be an entire article unto themselves with all choices, styles and features available out there today. A few things bear mentioning though. This is definitely another area where you get what you pay for. Winch bearing capability, recovery points, lighting considerations and rear tire mounts are all features to consider. We run budget bumpers on one of our jeeps that were bought when restraint was being exercised. They look good but are lacking in internal gussets that go a long way in adding some much needed structural integrity. In the $500 and $600 range, they are fairly lightweight in construction but are full width. When push comes to shove (or winch comes to pull ), they flex more than I'd like to see. Did I mention they were light? At the opposite end of the spectrum, our other rig sports a pair of high-end bumpers that are half the size and twice the weight. With enough internal bracing to qualify as a winch mounting plate up front and a capable tire carrier in the back, these were in the $900 and $1400 range. Full width bumpers may be required to remain compliant, so keep this in mind when choosing your aftermarket anchors.
Now, it's only fair to have a look at the other side of the coin, here in the great armour to excess debate. Let's say you decided to go for the lift and oversized off-road tires before sneaking anything under the Jeep in the way of armour, and you’re confident the wife won't notice. As mentioned before, you've got ground clearance on your side now, and you're a stone cold ace of a driver with nerves of steel, so do you really require all that added weight and expense? There is still a metric ton of other upgrades to heave your money at that will be more visible than a bunch of bolt on steel down under, right? At this point it really comes down to how far you are willing to go to follow that deteriorating trail, those semi sane buddies of yours or that kick ass off-road rig that showed up on the back of a trailer. Plenty of terrain can be traversed without the need for all these shenanigans, but then it only takes one incident for that rocker armour to pay for itself.
Now I'm determined to stop the silliness and put my own rig under a strict new diet. With that in mind, the next four skid plates I'm attaching will all be made of aluminum (replacement oil pan, new trans skid, transfer case and replacement gas tank skid all integrated). Let's see how that works out for me next month when we hit up Moab. After banging them over a bunch of red rock ledges, we'll see who's smiling.