CJaredo7's Jeep Buildup Page 7
New Body Preparations - Swapping the CJ tub for a YJ tub (the next 4 pages)
So, I needed to either get a new body or fix the one I had.... I figured I might as well check and see what was available if ANYTHING in a body in the area. I went to clements salvage and talked to Carl....great guy, helped me out! They actually had two wrangler bodies....but I wasn't sure if I could put a wrangler body on my CJ frame without much trouble... after researching the web a little I found that there's not much difference between them...Ok, I'll attempt it!
The body I ended up with came off an '89 wrangler sahara model....no dents (major ones anyway) and little to NO rust on it.... NICE! I got it home and proceeded to get it ready for herculining and undercoating. MAN it was nasty underneath...took almost a whole saturday to use my grinder with a wire wheel attachment and grind off the bottom of the tub so I could coat it with 3m undercoating. Here's what it looked like after the 8 hours of grinding, ready to be coated:
At this point I thought it was imperative that I treat any areas on the body that may possibly have even the slightest hint of rust....I used POR-15 to stop the rust and seal it from ever being a problem again. Areas that were subject to constant road grime were also treated with POR-15, BEFORE the rubberized undercoating was applied.
Here's the result of the undercoating application:
Nice... ok, now what? Well, I knew that I didn't want a YJ tailgate...I wanted to use my CJ tailgate...and this would require some mods to the tub. Among those mods would be that I had to get a way to put the hinges on the body...so to do that I decided to open up some pre-existing holes in the tub a little bit so that I could slip the bracket through them easily once the body was actually on the frame again. What I did is on the next page.