After a season of brutally beating on my XJ I have decided to install a cage. Or more accurately after scaring my wife half to death she has decided to let me spend the money. Since I have no idea how to bend tube, just how to draw pretty pictures of a cage design, Tom Baker and KarlVP said they would give me a hand. The actual build is taking place in Toms shop in Sultan Wa. Here is the basic design I drew up using my mad MS Paint skills.
Basically I’m not really a fan of external cages, and an internal cage wouldn’t protect my body, which if you have seen my rig you know it is fairly beat up after only one year. So I decided to chop most of the body off and replace it with tube. However new door are going to be fabricated using tube and sheet metal, and a new flat windshield is going on. My wife wants to keep the back seat, so that is staying and I’m currently looking for a Jeep Comanche tailgate to use on the rear. Anyways there are a number of other design elements that are going into this thing, but you can see them as the build goes.
So we start out with one perfectly good 1996 Jeep Cherokee (XJ)
Which some people say is a little beat up.
Tom gets to work “removing the doors” while I start striping the interior
We got the doors off and interior was mostly out when Toms roommate Chad stopped by to lend a hand.
Interior gutted
As you can see the “Unirail” has taken some damage just behind the cross member. To fix this KarlVP came up with an idea for plating the “Unirail” so the undercoating had to be scraped off.
I had a “wardrobe malfunction” with my front grill the other day and used 10 bolts to put it back on. Tom got so frustrated trying to find them all he resorted to the handyman’s favorite tool, a grinder with a cutting wheel.
Basically I’m not really a fan of external cages, and an internal cage wouldn’t protect my body, which if you have seen my rig you know it is fairly beat up after only one year. So I decided to chop most of the body off and replace it with tube. However new door are going to be fabricated using tube and sheet metal, and a new flat windshield is going on. My wife wants to keep the back seat, so that is staying and I’m currently looking for a Jeep Comanche tailgate to use on the rear. Anyways there are a number of other design elements that are going into this thing, but you can see them as the build goes.
So we start out with one perfectly good 1996 Jeep Cherokee (XJ)
Which some people say is a little beat up.
Tom gets to work “removing the doors” while I start striping the interior
We got the doors off and interior was mostly out when Toms roommate Chad stopped by to lend a hand.
Interior gutted
As you can see the “Unirail” has taken some damage just behind the cross member. To fix this KarlVP came up with an idea for plating the “Unirail” so the undercoating had to be scraped off.
I had a “wardrobe malfunction” with my front grill the other day and used 10 bolts to put it back on. Tom got so frustrated trying to find them all he resorted to the handyman’s favorite tool, a grinder with a cutting wheel.