Love these tops.
What i’d love is operable rear windows for a factory TJ hardtop. Sliders would be my preference over the hinged gull-wing but I love running a hardtop 100%, minus the lack of operable windows for rear passengers. I know the oem top design makes it hard to get there, but it’s still on my wishlist
When I was working on the JK/JKU slider/gullwing retrofit kits I mentioned in an earlier post, I also designed a retrofit kit for the TJ. The goal was to use a very affordable RV flat slider window and mount it in place of the compound-curved factory hardtop glass. A slider window installed with the retrofit kit would look something like this:
In this next image the retrofit kit is shown in blue for clarity, it's a frame that matches the curves of the window opening in the hardtop and provides a flat surface for the slider window.
I did a similar thing when I designed the rear barn door for the JK/JKU factory hardtop - the rear liftgate is glass with a compound curve and the barn door frame has an inset section with a flat mounting surface so flat glass or an RV window can be installed. You can see the inset flat mounting surface in this photo.
The finished (but unpainted) barn door with flat glass:
The retrofit kit would be a simple fiberglass piece that gets glued in place of the factory glass, and the RV slider would mount to the flat mounting hole in the retrofit kit.
An RV window company would do the sliders for less than $70 each wholesale, and the fiberglass retrofit kit is about as simple a piece to mold as can be, so that wouldn't be too expensive.
An even simpler product would be a gullwing hatch; the hatch could be molded to match the curves of the window mounting surface so no retrofit kit would be required.
A MOLLE panel could be mounted inside to the roll bar similar to the photo I posted earlier in this thread showing a JKU gullwing hatch with MOLLE inside:
These could easily be brought to market but I'm not sure there would be enough demand for any of these ideas to put them into production, seems like the TJ market isn't that rewarding to most vendors these days.
