Soft Tops Are Known to Be Noisy, Vibrate, and Not Seal Out the Elements

First, you gotta get topless! Remove the windows and upper door frames.

Unlatch the top, turn it inside out, and remove the Phillips screws from the front railing. Save all of your hardware. A Replace-A-Top only replaces the fabric and window portions of the top.

Pretend you’re Daniel Boone and skin the pelt from your upper doors. Serious Jeepers can make a pair of pants from the Jeep hide. Just be careful where you put the window.

Turn the Sailcloth top inside out and use the original screws to hold it to the front railing.

The spine from the old top slides into place on the new back window.

The new door skins attach to the door frames with Velcro. Slide the frames back into the lower door.

Only the rear and side-rear windows are tinted. The front windows are left clear to keep Johnny Law off your tail.

The new material is thicker and has an easier-to-clean texture than the old denim tops.

One feature we really liked was the Velcro-lined windows. No more fumbling with a flapping window when you’re trying to close it. Say, these might make a sweet pair of action pants.

Soft tops have never been well known for sealing out the elements. But more importantly they’re noisy. Some soft tops vibrate and flap like a crack junkie in rehab. Listening to your stereo may even be impossible at highway speeds, and forget about having a normal conversation at 65 mph. However, it’s way easier to flop down the cloth top for fresh air than to wrestle with a cumbersome fiberglass top and find a storage place to boot.

The Jeep engineers gathered resources to find a way to make soft tops more appealing. The result was Sailcloth material. Tops made from Sailcloth are said to be 3.5 decibels (or 50 percent) quieter than other tops at highway speeds. The new tops are thicker and multilayered so they resist temperature changes better than previous tops; they wear better in all-weathers; and they’re more tear-resistant. This may seem all well and great, but if you didn’t have a 2001 TJ you were out of luck.

Not anymore. Bestop recently introduced a Sailcloth Replace-A-Top that is an exact replica of the 2001 Jeep top. We got our grabby hands on a new one and ran it by the greatest skeptic of all, the little lady. She noticed that the annoying flap of the original top became a tolerable low-decibel rumble. The sweet tinted windows didn’t hurt either. Jay Miller at 4Wheel Parts Performance Center in San Marcos, California, spun us through the install that took only a few minutes with the help of a single Phillips screwdriver.