I've been working on the design details of the MB grille, and there are a few decisions to make. Here's a stock MB, notice how the hood hangs out over the grille a bit:
The challenge in achieving this look on a TJ is that to start with, the top of the grille sticks out beyond the hood, and the grille is curved outward to the degree that the bolts that secure the fender the grille shell are actually ahead of the front of the hood, which makes it difficult to have an MB-style grille recessed behind the front edge of the hood, also be perfectly vertical like the original MB and still bolt in place using the factory holes in the fenders.
I disassembled a TJ grille to study the problem. It's actually fairly easy to separate the grille face from the grille shell:
Here's a side view of the grille shell. If one were to put the flat, vertical MB grille face at the furthest forward part of the shell, the red line shows where it would end up being, and the "L" on the front left side of the red line shows how far it would stick out beyond the hood.
I'll explain the blue and yellow lines in a moment, but putting the grille face at the red line is what Jon Lennins did for his project. He grafted a (CJ-2a) grille onto a TJ grille, his video is on YouTube:
These are a few stills I grabbed from the video.
The builder says:
"As you can see the grille lips out quite a bit but from certain angles it doesn't look that bad."
I guess that means that from certain angles he thinks it doesn't look right.
Also, Jon basically put a stock CJ-2a grille face on and widened it at each side because the flatfender grilles are a bit narrower than the TJ grille.
I post his video and the stills as an example of one way to do this project, but I don't intend it in any way to be a criticism, he did a fine job.
If you were to move the grille face towards the rear as much as possible and still retain the factory fender-grille bolt holes, you'd put the face at the blue line. It's about a half inch further back than the red line example, but it still would stick out past the front of the hood.
The yellow line shows where the face would be if it were not to stick out beyond the front of the hood.
So putting the face far enough back so that it doesn't stick out past the front of the hood and still works with unmodified factory fenders (and aftermarket flat fenders) is the challenge, I think where you really want the grille face to be is at the yellow line.
Do people prefer the look Jon achieved with the grille sticking out past the front of the hood or do people think it be preferable to have the grille face far enough back so it does not stick out past the hood?
I have designs for both options, and I have a way for both of them retain the factory fender-grille mounting holes so they both work with factory or aftermarket fenders.
The other design decision is the size and spacing of the nine slots in the grille (MBs had 9 slots, CJ-2a's had 7). Jon's design grafts the stock CJ-2a grille directly into the TJ grille and widens it at the edges to make up the difference in with. Here's what MB-size headlights look like in a TJ grille:
My preference would be to adjust the proportions of everything so the headlights are in the proper position (roughly as seen above) and resize the slots slightly so they fill the space between the headlights properly (remember that the MN grille has 9 slots instead of the 7 in the TJ grill in the photo above). BTW since Jon used a CJ-2a grille, his headlights are the same size as the TJ headlights (and his has 7 slots, not 9).
Comments on any of the above are very welcome, I'm trying to finalize the design in the next few days.
