Sprowley, looks like your top fits great! If i get a set of full doors I will probably get tj ones.
So.. I bought a 2000 dodge ram with the cummins and a new trailer. I towed the jeep for about 2.5 hours over to the manastash area of the wenatchee national forest. I unloaded the jeep and started heading up trail # 4w30 towards the moon rocks. It was doing pretty much awesome for all of about 5 minutes until the engine suddenly stopped. a group of jeepers stopped to help me diagnose the problem to a complete lack of fuel pressure. we tried wiring the pump directly to the battery and still no go. A guy in a toyota stopped by a little later and i was able to convince him to tow me back down to the gravel road so i could get her loaded back on the trailer.
I got it home and immediately decided to cut an access panel in the back of the jeep so i could get to the pump without having to drop the tank. I pulled out the sending unit, and it turned out that the pump had competely fallen off of it and become disconnected. The reason this happened is that the previous owner had totally mutilated the sending unit for some unknown reason so that the only thing holding the pump to it was the little rubber hose.
I went to Oreilly's and bought a new sending unit which came with a new pump. I went to put it in and it wouldn't fit all the way down. upon further inspection, the bottom of the tank had been dented in, which is most likely why the old sending unit had been "modified". I tried to un-dent the tank by pounding a 2x4 through the tank access hole, but it wasn't working. I found another tank on craigslist and purchased it.
I then spent the next couple of days welding up a new tank skid to make sure that the tank doesn't get dented again, and I finally got it in today.
I've been invited to go wheeling with some guys this coming weekend, so hopefully I'll be able to get some pics. from the few minutes that I did have it on the trail, it became obvious that I at least need to get a steering damper on the front. I will probably end up going with hydro assist, but won't be able to get that done before the weekend.
This is what my acess hole looks like from below. As you can sort of see the hole cuts into a bit of the cross member, so i bent up a piece of 1"x1/8" bar and welded it in to brace it up. It feels pretty strong and doesn't flex at all.
Here are some pics of the tank skid. It is made from 3/16 plate. I started by tracing the factory skid and just built it up from there. I also built the skid so that it would lift the tank up about an inch to match my 1 inch body lift. This also required cutting the upper lip off of one of the frame cross members. I didn't get a final pic of it installed, but it looks ok. It's not my greatest work but it's functional.
Once i had it all tacked together, i made the brackets that hold it onto the frame. I bolted the brackets onto the frame and then used my harbor freight transmission jack to lift the tank and skid into place. Once in place i tacked the brackets on, lowered it down, fully welded it and then painted it. It's not shown but I reused the rubber mat that went between the factory skid and tank, and I reused the tank straps to hold the tank to the skid.
So hopefully i will get some trail pics and video this weekend.
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Length Envy: A build thread
