If you hang on around here long enough you'll get past the negativity and see the good information. There is a large dislike of Metal Cloak here also so be prepared for that. It really is worth sticking around. The wealth of information far outweighs the crap.
Figure that out first before you start doing any major work.
I have 9" wheel & 1" or 1.5" spacers. I need to check again since I don't remember.
My feelings for this is that you build for where you live and will be doing most of your wheeling and then just wheel within your build when going to other places. I've never felt tippy but I can manipulate my suspension and shift my body to the high side. I don't have coil springs or coilovers instead I have air springs.
I've got their 8" flares because I wanted to try and cover my tires as much as possible for the times I did drive it on the street. Yes those Baja Pro XS tires have a pretty big bulge. I'll try to get something on the tires so I can get a good measurement. My front axle is Waggy width.
There are some tighter trails in the Naches & Rimrock area where a TJ body barely fits between the trees. The one thing is that I'm a huge believer in staying on the actual trail. I don't do bypasses around these tight spots. You can see where people have to fit their larger rigs thru some spots but this is what also gets trails closed.
The Rattllesnake trail has a max width of 75" and I think a WB restriction of 100". But within 3 months of it being reopened people had gone in and cut out the tight turns,
Why do you keep breaking your Dana 30? What are you breaking? I've seen Dana 30's on 36" TSL tires live behind a CJ with a V-8.
I know there's great info on here, but yes it's hard to navigate past the rest. Kinda like when I was in the navy; people are more interested in telling you that you're wrong than educating you so you can be better.
For now, I'm aiming at 37s with a 76" overall width, and 103" wheelbase. But if I end up going with 60s instead of 44s, I'd like to keep the possibility of going to 39s and a stretch open. That's why I probably won't swap to mid arms or outboard the shocks until I have some time with the 37s.
I agree, build for where you wheel the most. That's a little hard for me because while I wheel every month or so in Washington, Moab is so important to me that I'd like it to work well there too.
I figure if I go with an AEV style highline, I can get 74" of coverage, and with the metalcloaks I can get 76". That and max trail width are my deciding factors. If there is a certain line on a trail I can't take, that's fine. But I don't want to be completely excluded because of width.
I bent my low pinion passenger tube/driver C, either in Tillamook (my first big wheeling trip) or frankly on a pothole going about 50mph on the same trip. My high pinion 30 I chipped the teeth on, likely when I was stuck in mud for a few hours in Moab. Same high pinion is now bent, though it may have always been. It just became an issue after my last trip to Moab for EJS 23, after doing Pickle and Metal Masher. But, it might have always been bent, and switching to ball joint deletes made the issue more obvious.
And if you hang around longer enougher, you might realize there are technical and defendable reasons why certain things like Metalcloak is dishonest crap, thanks to the wealth of information here.
An example of this valuable wealth of information is an understanding of the importance of steering axis inclination, and how to select an axle width and wheel backspacing to avoid bad steering and ruining ball joints. All of which is based on defendable tech, and not simply a baseless attack founded on indiscriminate negativity.
I have learned that metalcloak doesn't provide the same benefits of highlines as they claim. I'm interested in them because how easy it is to remove the flairs, and it seems it's possible to convert them into actual highlines, similar to DIY AEV highlines. I need fender coverage, so having wide fenders on the road that I can remove when I'm in the trees is ideal for me, as long as I can actually get the uptravel.
Regarding steering, that's something I'm just starting to learn about. I have factory axles, with 3.75" backspacing and 35X12.5 tires. I wonder if it would be better to have wider axles and more backspacing, like the 5.5" backspacing from the factory. I built my Jeep 5 years ago based on what I was advised to do here; was that the wrong way to do it, or was that acceptable so I didn't have to pay for new axles?