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Shrink Ray TJ Part 1Micro-sizing our beater TJ From the November, 2012 issue of Jp By Verne Simons
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Someone, we are not sure who, once said just ’cause you can do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. That person was right. We here at Jp have lots of ideas, but they’re not necessarily always good ones. But recently we think we may have hit on something worthwhile. You be the judge. Somewhere along the line someone else seems to have decided that bigger is always better. Au contraire, mon freres (that means: “Not so fast, pal,” in Japanese or some such foreign language). The fact is that some obstacles are easier with a long wheelbase, lots of horsepower, and huge tires, but very often a small rig can work well, too. Personally, we like a challenge, and we can see that bigger is not always better. We have always intended to... We have always intended to keep our ’97 TJ relatively light while building it to be strong and making it work better. If the finished weight ends up close to the stock weight, we’ll have won. We also always planned on keeping it a beater and retaining the what-the-hell-is-that-piece-of-dung-doing-this-far-down-this-trail look. First step in the major modifications—blow the front apart in preparation to shorten the frame, push the grille back, lighten, strengthen, and increase the approach angle. Example: The first Jeeps look tiny in comparison to a decked out, full-boogie JK Unlimited. And even though JKs are amazing off-road, don’t forget that it was the little, small-tired Jeeps that cut the trails for ’em. Counter to everyone else’s current plan of bigger and better, we had an idea. Why not try to make a TJ smaller and lighter—like a flattie, Samurai, or early CJ-5? All these rigs have a cult following because they work off-road. This is often because of their small size and light weight. We thought we could leave our TJ’s wheelbase stock, but shorten the front and rear of the body improving approach and departure angles while shedding a bit of weight. This is kind of like adding a lift and bigger tires where the larger tires can help reduce approach and departure angles. This way we could have a rig that is different from the norm, starts right up like a TJ, drives down the road almost like stock, and can be pushed through tougher trails all over the US despite being relatively small. How should we do this? Well a shrink-ray gun would be best, but Rick Moranis still won’t return our calls. Boo. Second best is to take a fairly unmolested TJ and cut, chop, and hack until the rig is small, and pay attention to trimming the fat where it ain’t doing anything for us. With help from RockAuto, Parts Mike, Pro Comp, C&C Fabrication, and Master-Pull, we cut up and re-work the front end of our ’97 four-banger TJ to make it tougher, shorter, and hopefully a little lighter. Next time we’ll show you how we trimmed down the rear while adding some serious trail protection!  This is one of the key parts...  This is one of the key parts of our Shrink-Ray TJ recipe: a front-sweep ’07 JK steering box from RockAuto (A-1 Cardone PN 27520). This box allowed us to significantly shorten the front framerails of our TJ. You could also source an early Ford, Scout, or right-hand-drive JK steering box to mount on the outside of the framerail. You’ll have to fab that yourself, as our plan was to recreate the steering of a JK on our TJ. Sort of. Oh yeah, you also have to be okay with dropping the front sway bar on your TJ. That’s fine by us, but body roll in the turns will be more noticeable.  In order to get the JK box...  In order to get the JK box on the TJ frame we had to hack off the heavy cast steel track bar bracket and flatten this area of the frame. We welded in a piece of plate and sleeved the four-mounting bolt holes with some thick-wall tubing. Here you can see the flat plate and sleeves we installed along with strap steel to strengthen the framerail in the area that we hacked up. JK boxes also have a bad rap for breaking sector shafts. That may be true on a 7,000lb, 37-inch-tire Unlimited with a big lift and a dropped pitman arm. We bet it will work fine on our relatively small tire’d 3,500-4,000lb TJ, even if we end up running 35s someday.  Once we got the JK box installed...  Once we got the JK box installed we raised the stock TJ pillow block and shortened the stock TJ steering shaft. We attached it to the JK box using a 3⁄4-inch DD Borgeson steering U-joint (PN U16N-7DDx7DD) from Parts Mike. This allowed us to trim the back of the grille a little and mock up the new location for the grille, radiator, and A/C condenser about 41⁄2 inches farther back on the framerails than stock. Yep, our little TJ has A/C and in the deserts of Arizona we are keeping it. If we would have dropped the A/C, we could have pushed the grille and radiator back a touch more.  We picked up a used Warn 9500...  We picked up a used Warn 9500 winch some time back and given what we want to do with this TJ and how much we used the winch before the Shrink-Ray conversion, we knew we wanted to retain it. To do this we hacked into the TJ grille with an air saw (which made us feel a little dirty), cut down the Warn winch mount in the chop saw, and sunk the winch into the grille.  Since we pushed the grille...  Since we pushed the grille back 41⁄2 inches we had to shorten the hood too. We carefully cut the hood then recycled the factory reinforcement on the rear of the hood by grinding and cutting out spot welds. We then glued and riveted the reinforcement back in place as well as it would fit. So far, it’s holding up. Time will tell long-term.  Once the front of the Jeep...  Once the front of the Jeep was pretty well back together we ground off the horn that grabs the lower stock TJ steering box mounting points, broke out the ol’ Sawzall, and removed about 8 inches of front framerail. We should end up with a 0-degree approach angle with 33-inch tires. That means we should be able to drive up to a wall and the tires will hit just before or at the same time as the winch or bumper. We also added tubing and a grille hoop for strength and rollover protection.  Here is our home-fabbed, frame-side...  Here is our home-fabbed, frame-side track-bar mount that allows the track bar and drag link to be parallel at ride height. Since our TJ is so low, the track bar and drag link run slightly up hill, but that’s okay. For now we like the height, but we may add an inch of lift someday. We have been thinking of hogging out a stock TJ pitman arm to replace the longer-than-stock Parts Mike unit. This will slow the steering a bit, which is slightly twitchy at highway speed.  We might have been able to...  We might have been able to reuse elements of the stock TJ steering linkage on this build, but we have already bent stock steering parts so an upgrade including parts necessary to re-engineer the track bar was a good idea. With a call to Parts Mike, we were set up with its Handler Steering Kit. This kit comes with a Tera High-Steer passenger knuckle, a thick, long pitman arm (that worked on our JK box), brackets, spherical rod ends and tubing for the new track bar, and 1-ton tie-rod ends and pre-tapped 0.250-wall tubing for the drag link and tie rod. The Handler Kit is also a great upgrade for standard TJs and all but eliminates bumpsteer.  The TJ Handler kit from Parts...  The TJ Handler kit from Parts Mike allowed us to set up our steering perfectly and we can bounce it off rocks with impunity. We shortened the track bar mount on the axle and engineered our own track bar mount at the frame. Check out how parallel our drag link and track bar are at ride height. The track bar barely fits between the diff and the steering box on the driver side and sits just under the passenger-side framerail at full stuff.  We are self-proclaimed cheap...  We are self-proclaimed cheap bastards, and while we are willing to pay a premium for awesome parts that are worth the dough, we still like saving cash. This is especially true when we find an inexpensive product that is well made here in the good ol’ U.S.of A.! Since our shortened TJ hood meant the stock fenders would be too long, we modified C&C Fabrication’s Hood Line Jeep Tube Fenders for CJ, YJ, and TJ to fit. These fenders are available on eBay for about $145 shipped. The little LED signal lights are an add-on, as were the tabs.  The C&C Fabrications Tube...  The C&C Fabrications Tube Fenders came with nice steel filler plates for the top and sides of the fenders. We tacked the supplied tops of the fenders on and added some tabs so we could have removable and replaceable eclectic fenders on our beater TJ. The driver side has part of a hacked-up No Parking sign we bought for a few coins on eBay. The passenger side is filled with some bullet-ridden, rusted sheetmetal found on a trail in the desert.  Our little TJ with 33s and...  Our little TJ with 33s and the winch sunk into the grille means we can now drive the little Jeep right up to steep climbs without worrying about grinding the TJ’s nose or steering box on the rocks. This will allow the relatively small TJ to work more like a big tire’d rig off-road. We also dropped the heavy wire rope in favor of a Master-Pull Green Rope and aluminum Hawse fairlead. The rope and fairlead alone helped us drop nearly 30 lbs. Proceeds of Green Rope sales go towards protecting the trails in Johnson Valley. Next time we will focus on shrinking the rear of our TJ.
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