I ghosted the forum for about a year while rebuilding my TJ, and I’m just now getting around to throwing together a build thread for the project. I didn’t initially create one because A: I didn’t have an account on the TJ Forum, and B: I didn’t want documenting to a substantially detailed level to take time away from the build. Now, however, I’ve got far more time, and I’ve had a chance to actually take my rig out for a weekend campout on some state forest roads. This thread is going to serve as documentation for my build so far, and will continue to report progress towards mods and upgrades. Lucky for me, I took over a thousand pictures and videos whilst tearing down and rebuilding the Jeep, so I’ve got plenty to share.
It all started during the winter of 2022; I was a junior in high school, and, having had to sell my first car due to necessary repairs I didn’t think were worth making, I had my license, but no ride. I had initially settled for a sort of “regular” car”: a 1992 Pontiac Sunbird. It was a great little convertible, but after selling it, I decided to get what I had really wanted, since middle school: a TJ. Thus, I set about the task of finding a TJ in my budget. Boy, did I underestimate how much time, effort, and money I was about to sink into that Jeep.
I ended up settling on a ‘98 Sport, in PEA (Chili Pepper Pearl) with the 4.0, a 32rh, 137k on the clock. The Jeep had a little 1.5” budget boost and 31” tires also; It had a hard time starting, the alignment was a little loose, and it had some small rust spots. Some previous owner had swapped most of the exterior components for chrome ones, so it was a little too shiny, but I loved that thing; I’d finally bought a TJ! I picked it up about two hours from my house, and drove it home feeling like a million bucks.
I immediately started daily driving it to school, and began tinkering with little things on the weekends. I did some tune-ups to the engine bay, Cleaned a bunch of junk out of it from the previous owner, and installed a new stereo and speakers to replace the busted ones I had gotten with it. The running boards were pretty shot, and one was detached from the body mound bolt it was supposed to be held on by at one end, so I ordered a new set of those.
Crawling under the Jeep in the garage for the first time, I slowly began to realize what a disaster the undercarriage was. The previous owner mentioned nothing about the fact that the driver side floorboard had pretty much rotted out; someone had plastered some sheet metal over the hole with screws and attached the running board to that. Once I’d cleared out all the damage, I realized that that torque box was rusted out, and the body mount on that corner was toast.
With this ascertained, I began making plans to take the Jeep off the road for a few weeks between my junior and senior years in order to patch the driver side torque box and floor pan. I ordered a floor pan, a torque box, and some body mount bolts, and in July, I backed the TJ into the garage and started taking stuff apart.
I removed the soft top, and took the seats and center console out - you can imagine my surprise to learn that the seat bolts were only there in the fronts of the front seats, and the back bolts had been patched over to fix the floor. Additionally, the whole interior had been hit with a spray-in bedliner. Initially, I thought this was a plus: rust protection for the interior! Turns out, not so much; after ruining ten or so cutoff wheels cutting and grinding that stuff working my way through the floor, I will never bedline the body panels of a vehicle or buy a vehicle that has been bedlined again.
I got the first bad section out, and pulled some body bolts, and realized there was more rot. The more rot I cut out, the more sheet metal I ordered, until I had an entire new floor sitting in the garage and still wasn’t at the edges of the rot yet. All the floor pans were shot, the torque boxes were garbage, the rear crossmember was swiss cheese, and the frame was not far off from busted. Additionally, every single body panel had at least a couple dents and some paint damage, if not rust holes hidden under trim or very poorly patched and painted over. The more I took it apart, the more parts I realized were junk. As I worked my way through the second half of July and hit the beginning of August, it became clear that if I was keeping the Jeep, it was going to take a lot of work.
In mid August, I made the decision to abandon the old tub and find a donor for a new tub, so I began scouring the entire Northeast and down the East coast on Craigslist and Marketplace looking for tubs. I finally found one in South Carolina with a matching paint code, (figured I could paint it a lot easier if I wasn’t going all the way to bare metal before spot primer), and paid a disgusting amount of money for the seller to ship it to me in WNY, along with a pair of red fenders to replace my crusty rust belt pair.
Since those took over a month to arrive (negotiations and the seller taking forever made the whole thing a huge pain), I turned to finishing the disassembly. With the assistance of my dad, who relearned to MIG weld (he was happy to have an excuse to finally buy a unit) to plate up the frame repairs for me, I set about fixing my swiss cheese frame. I removed the entire body, and got to work grinding, patching, priming, and painting. It’s far from perfect now, but it’s a hell of a lot sturdier and better than it was.
To work on the frame, I pulled the transfer case skid, and of course, with the rest of the Jeep being a rust bucket, all the bolt holes were ruined. I cleaned up and repainted the skid, and tried to use one of MrBlaine’s nutsert kits, but the frame was too thin and they inevitably spun, so I resorted to cutting through the frame to weld nuts to the inside (they’re working for now; fingers crossed).
Next, I began a long and frustrating fight with the transmission. It had been leaking, another fact the PO neglected to share. I pulled the pan, dropped the valve body, and replaced the shift shaft seal (don’t ask me how many times I had to reopen the pan; it’s not zero). The transmission presented numerous reoccurring problems throughout the entire project, and I ended up replacing the shift shaft seal, drilling out a rivet on the valve body to replace a busted plastic piece on the detent lever that connects to the NSS, and adding a deep capacity transmission pan with a drain plug. You might say that after opening up and draining the asinine pan design 5 times, I was tired of pouring ATF all over myself.
While working on the frame and waiting for the body to arrive, I decided that the crusty suspension needed to go, and started accumulating a mountain of parts to gut and rebuild the entire thing. I started with a JSPEC 2.5” lift kit (I eventually want to get 33” tires) and from there, I repainted both sway bars and their brackets, replaced both track bars, replaced all 8 control arms, and replaced every single bolt in the suspension (stainless or grade 8 wherever possible). Someone had installed a steering stabilizer too, so I repainted that and kept it as well.
It wasn’t just the moving parts that were shot, however: I ended up cutting off the spring perches and frame connections in the rear and ordering new ones to weld on as well. My dad and I did one end of the suspension setup at a time, starting with the rear. I disconnected the whole suspension, got the axle on jack stands, and cleaned and painted it. I ground off the ruined spring perches and my dad welded on the new ones, and I painted up the rest of the parts before we put the whole rear suspension together. By now the body had long since arrived, but we had a long way to go before the new tub went on.
As fall ended and winter went by, progress slowed. It took me nearly two months to tear down the front suspension and finish the last few bits of paint on the frame. Once my dad and I assembled the front suspension, the Jeep was finally a roller again. With the frame and suspension complete, it was time to finish the odds and ends; the exhaust system, the fuel system (swapped out of a parts Jeep I bought in August), miscellaneous painting and assembly, the water pump, the fuel pump, the fan clutch, the transmission, etc. Then, finally, we could start on the body.
We began by taking the far less rusty donor dub and cleaning up the bad paint and pitted floors; I didn’t need these to be perfect, as I had Armorlite that was going to cover the whole interior. My dad welded patches for the small damaged areas on the floor pans, and I got to work cleaning everything up with a grinder and body filler. I ended up spot priming the underside and painting it with a combination of farm paint and black spray paint. I then painted the engine bay side of the firewall black with spray paint as well. It’s not a show car, so I wanted something functional and easy to repaint should the need arise. Once the body was ready to start being sanded, we finally got around to mounting it on the frame. That was a good day.
Next, I began prepping all the other body panels. The doors needed body filler, the windshield was coming out of the frame (tried to reinstall it ourselves and broke it; had a guy come out and install a new one - the guys on here that say it’s too much of a hassle not to farm out are right), the fenders needed to be painted black on the insides, and the inside of the tailgate needed to be painted black. I also spent a weekend painting the entire inside of the tub black. I didn’t bother dealing with all the surface damage and blemishes; the interior hides all that and all I cared about was stopping rust. I mounted all the hinges (some new, some old, some off of other jeeps) on the articulating panels, and we put the whole body together. I had to retap just about every bolt hole on the tub, but once we were done, it actually looked like a Jeep again!
Finishing the suspension and assembly of the body had taken the rest of the winter and most of the spring, and we didn’t get to the body work and paint stage until the end of May. As June rolled in, I was pushing hard to get the Jeep done by the end of the school year (remember, it had been in pieces my entire senior year of high school). I installed the dash and the pedals before we painted it, and put the engine bay back together minus the lights and the cooling system. At one point doing the body filler work, I actually pulled an all-nighter trying to finish the steps required before primer. We missed our self imposed deadline of the end of the school year, but we were on the home stretch at this point. Once the school year ended, I worked on that Jeep like it was my 9-5 and hobbies; 10, 12, 15, even 20 hours a day, and over those next few weeks, sanding, primer, more sanding, paint, clearcoat, and wet sanding were finished up.
I then began the mad dash to finish all the odds and ends; the cooling system, the lights, the seats, the top, the bumpers (still haven't finished the rear bumper, oops) the center console, the trim, the fender flares, and then, FINALLY, I took it for a test drive. On July 4, 2024, just under a year after I took it off the road, I had my Jeep back.
Since then, I’ve taken it to a car show, gone on a wheeling trip, and driven all over the Adirondacks with it in my first semester of college. I love that little Jeep, and I’ve long since stopped keeping track of the official tally of how much money I have into it. I have so many more plans for mods, and I’m sure my battle with the rust monster is far from over, but for now, my rig is in rust remission.
It all started during the winter of 2022; I was a junior in high school, and, having had to sell my first car due to necessary repairs I didn’t think were worth making, I had my license, but no ride. I had initially settled for a sort of “regular” car”: a 1992 Pontiac Sunbird. It was a great little convertible, but after selling it, I decided to get what I had really wanted, since middle school: a TJ. Thus, I set about the task of finding a TJ in my budget. Boy, did I underestimate how much time, effort, and money I was about to sink into that Jeep.
I ended up settling on a ‘98 Sport, in PEA (Chili Pepper Pearl) with the 4.0, a 32rh, 137k on the clock. The Jeep had a little 1.5” budget boost and 31” tires also; It had a hard time starting, the alignment was a little loose, and it had some small rust spots. Some previous owner had swapped most of the exterior components for chrome ones, so it was a little too shiny, but I loved that thing; I’d finally bought a TJ! I picked it up about two hours from my house, and drove it home feeling like a million bucks.
I immediately started daily driving it to school, and began tinkering with little things on the weekends. I did some tune-ups to the engine bay, Cleaned a bunch of junk out of it from the previous owner, and installed a new stereo and speakers to replace the busted ones I had gotten with it. The running boards were pretty shot, and one was detached from the body mound bolt it was supposed to be held on by at one end, so I ordered a new set of those.
Crawling under the Jeep in the garage for the first time, I slowly began to realize what a disaster the undercarriage was. The previous owner mentioned nothing about the fact that the driver side floorboard had pretty much rotted out; someone had plastered some sheet metal over the hole with screws and attached the running board to that. Once I’d cleared out all the damage, I realized that that torque box was rusted out, and the body mount on that corner was toast.
With this ascertained, I began making plans to take the Jeep off the road for a few weeks between my junior and senior years in order to patch the driver side torque box and floor pan. I ordered a floor pan, a torque box, and some body mount bolts, and in July, I backed the TJ into the garage and started taking stuff apart.
I removed the soft top, and took the seats and center console out - you can imagine my surprise to learn that the seat bolts were only there in the fronts of the front seats, and the back bolts had been patched over to fix the floor. Additionally, the whole interior had been hit with a spray-in bedliner. Initially, I thought this was a plus: rust protection for the interior! Turns out, not so much; after ruining ten or so cutoff wheels cutting and grinding that stuff working my way through the floor, I will never bedline the body panels of a vehicle or buy a vehicle that has been bedlined again.
I got the first bad section out, and pulled some body bolts, and realized there was more rot. The more rot I cut out, the more sheet metal I ordered, until I had an entire new floor sitting in the garage and still wasn’t at the edges of the rot yet. All the floor pans were shot, the torque boxes were garbage, the rear crossmember was swiss cheese, and the frame was not far off from busted. Additionally, every single body panel had at least a couple dents and some paint damage, if not rust holes hidden under trim or very poorly patched and painted over. The more I took it apart, the more parts I realized were junk. As I worked my way through the second half of July and hit the beginning of August, it became clear that if I was keeping the Jeep, it was going to take a lot of work.
In mid August, I made the decision to abandon the old tub and find a donor for a new tub, so I began scouring the entire Northeast and down the East coast on Craigslist and Marketplace looking for tubs. I finally found one in South Carolina with a matching paint code, (figured I could paint it a lot easier if I wasn’t going all the way to bare metal before spot primer), and paid a disgusting amount of money for the seller to ship it to me in WNY, along with a pair of red fenders to replace my crusty rust belt pair.
Since those took over a month to arrive (negotiations and the seller taking forever made the whole thing a huge pain), I turned to finishing the disassembly. With the assistance of my dad, who relearned to MIG weld (he was happy to have an excuse to finally buy a unit) to plate up the frame repairs for me, I set about fixing my swiss cheese frame. I removed the entire body, and got to work grinding, patching, priming, and painting. It’s far from perfect now, but it’s a hell of a lot sturdier and better than it was.
To work on the frame, I pulled the transfer case skid, and of course, with the rest of the Jeep being a rust bucket, all the bolt holes were ruined. I cleaned up and repainted the skid, and tried to use one of MrBlaine’s nutsert kits, but the frame was too thin and they inevitably spun, so I resorted to cutting through the frame to weld nuts to the inside (they’re working for now; fingers crossed).
Next, I began a long and frustrating fight with the transmission. It had been leaking, another fact the PO neglected to share. I pulled the pan, dropped the valve body, and replaced the shift shaft seal (don’t ask me how many times I had to reopen the pan; it’s not zero). The transmission presented numerous reoccurring problems throughout the entire project, and I ended up replacing the shift shaft seal, drilling out a rivet on the valve body to replace a busted plastic piece on the detent lever that connects to the NSS, and adding a deep capacity transmission pan with a drain plug. You might say that after opening up and draining the asinine pan design 5 times, I was tired of pouring ATF all over myself.
While working on the frame and waiting for the body to arrive, I decided that the crusty suspension needed to go, and started accumulating a mountain of parts to gut and rebuild the entire thing. I started with a JSPEC 2.5” lift kit (I eventually want to get 33” tires) and from there, I repainted both sway bars and their brackets, replaced both track bars, replaced all 8 control arms, and replaced every single bolt in the suspension (stainless or grade 8 wherever possible). Someone had installed a steering stabilizer too, so I repainted that and kept it as well.
It wasn’t just the moving parts that were shot, however: I ended up cutting off the spring perches and frame connections in the rear and ordering new ones to weld on as well. My dad and I did one end of the suspension setup at a time, starting with the rear. I disconnected the whole suspension, got the axle on jack stands, and cleaned and painted it. I ground off the ruined spring perches and my dad welded on the new ones, and I painted up the rest of the parts before we put the whole rear suspension together. By now the body had long since arrived, but we had a long way to go before the new tub went on.
As fall ended and winter went by, progress slowed. It took me nearly two months to tear down the front suspension and finish the last few bits of paint on the frame. Once my dad and I assembled the front suspension, the Jeep was finally a roller again. With the frame and suspension complete, it was time to finish the odds and ends; the exhaust system, the fuel system (swapped out of a parts Jeep I bought in August), miscellaneous painting and assembly, the water pump, the fuel pump, the fan clutch, the transmission, etc. Then, finally, we could start on the body.
We began by taking the far less rusty donor dub and cleaning up the bad paint and pitted floors; I didn’t need these to be perfect, as I had Armorlite that was going to cover the whole interior. My dad welded patches for the small damaged areas on the floor pans, and I got to work cleaning everything up with a grinder and body filler. I ended up spot priming the underside and painting it with a combination of farm paint and black spray paint. I then painted the engine bay side of the firewall black with spray paint as well. It’s not a show car, so I wanted something functional and easy to repaint should the need arise. Once the body was ready to start being sanded, we finally got around to mounting it on the frame. That was a good day.
Next, I began prepping all the other body panels. The doors needed body filler, the windshield was coming out of the frame (tried to reinstall it ourselves and broke it; had a guy come out and install a new one - the guys on here that say it’s too much of a hassle not to farm out are right), the fenders needed to be painted black on the insides, and the inside of the tailgate needed to be painted black. I also spent a weekend painting the entire inside of the tub black. I didn’t bother dealing with all the surface damage and blemishes; the interior hides all that and all I cared about was stopping rust. I mounted all the hinges (some new, some old, some off of other jeeps) on the articulating panels, and we put the whole body together. I had to retap just about every bolt hole on the tub, but once we were done, it actually looked like a Jeep again!
Finishing the suspension and assembly of the body had taken the rest of the winter and most of the spring, and we didn’t get to the body work and paint stage until the end of May. As June rolled in, I was pushing hard to get the Jeep done by the end of the school year (remember, it had been in pieces my entire senior year of high school). I installed the dash and the pedals before we painted it, and put the engine bay back together minus the lights and the cooling system. At one point doing the body filler work, I actually pulled an all-nighter trying to finish the steps required before primer. We missed our self imposed deadline of the end of the school year, but we were on the home stretch at this point. Once the school year ended, I worked on that Jeep like it was my 9-5 and hobbies; 10, 12, 15, even 20 hours a day, and over those next few weeks, sanding, primer, more sanding, paint, clearcoat, and wet sanding were finished up.
I then began the mad dash to finish all the odds and ends; the cooling system, the lights, the seats, the top, the bumpers (still haven't finished the rear bumper, oops) the center console, the trim, the fender flares, and then, FINALLY, I took it for a test drive. On July 4, 2024, just under a year after I took it off the road, I had my Jeep back.
Since then, I’ve taken it to a car show, gone on a wheeling trip, and driven all over the Adirondacks with it in my first semester of college. I love that little Jeep, and I’ve long since stopped keeping track of the official tally of how much money I have into it. I have so many more plans for mods, and I’m sure my battle with the rust monster is far from over, but for now, my rig is in rust remission.
