best way to recover a flopped or rolled XJ?

No, I haven't flopped my rig, but it's probably what I worry about most when wheelin'. Anyway, for future reference and slight peace of mind, what's a good way to right a flopped XJ without doing more damage? When we were in Tellico last summer one of the guys with us flopped his XJ on the passenger side. The only way I'd ever seen a flopped XJ recovered before was to bring the strap over the roof and wrap it around the b-pillar on the ground (the passenger-side b-pillar in this case), so that's what we did. It worked fine, but the force from the strap folded the rain gutters down over the tops of the doors. I've only recovered one flipped SWB Jeep before, and I just wrapped a strap around the frame rail on it, and as we all know you can't exactly do that on an XJ... So I was just wondering what other folks have done to get a unibody shiney side up again.

rock rails?

that was one of my thoughts, but there's no way I'd trust my current rails to something like that, and my new ones probably won't have any gap btwn the body, so that's out, unless I wrapped a strap around the support legs.

A roof rack like the Farm one could probably be used to hook a strap to. Or how about a bunch of guys pushing? :laugh3:

Probably not a good idea if you're trying to not damage your rig (even though it's been rolled) but what about rapping the strap around the pillar between the doors on the side thats up? If the doors are removed it'd be pretty easy, but I don't know how well it would stand up to it.

nhrocker said:

A roof rack like the Farm one could probably be used to hook a strap to. Or how about a bunch of guys pushing? :laugh3:

Probably not a good idea if you're trying to not damage your rig (even though it's been rolled) but what about rapping the strap around the pillar between the doors on the side thats up? If the doors are removed it'd be pretty easy, but I don't know how well it would stand up to it.

Click to expand...

thought about that - then looked at my rig:


put the strap on my B-Pillar now....

I just looped a strap through the two axles and winched mine over. The key is to make sure the vehicle does not skid, but actually flops over. It doesn't hurt to have someone have a line up and over from the other side to reduce the impact as the vehicle comes to rest on it's wheels. I've actually seen one flop over on the other side if the terrain was irregular.

We got my junk off it's side by simply wrapping my strap around the B pillar & door/window frames (with the windows ALL the way open). The winch vehicle was behind me... we had to rig a pulley to a tree beside me to get the cable pulling in the proper direction. It tweaked the frames a tad, but the glass still goes up & down.


Rock rails, crossmember, or axles would have worked too...but I didn't want to get my strap muddy :rattle: