Upgrading Jackson’s Green Jeep

J

JacksonsGreenJeep

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May 25, 2021
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Black Hawk, CO
So it begins. :)

Just made my first true “upgrade” to the Electric Lime LJ. It had huge heavy Smittybilt bumpers front and rear with a swing out tire carrier. With my super shallow garage they made it hard to fit it in there. For now I just removed the swing out assembly and the spare from the rear and got a new bumper for the front.

I ended up with a Rock Hard 4x4 Freedom Series, since I’m setting the LJ up for flat towing and Rock Hard has an option for Blue Ox brackets on their front bumper. The bumper fit up pretty nicely and I added their optional steering box skid plate.

Obviously heavier than the Savvy aluminum job but they’re not currently in stock and don’t have a flat tow option anyway.

I’m sure I’ll have lots of dumb questions as I build it up…

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So this is Jackson, showing off his license plate:

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Jackson is 14 and on the autism spectrum. He’s my Jeep nut, and has been obsessed with bright green Jeeps since he was about 4 years old. Since we now live in the Colorado mountains I decided earlier this year that it was time to take the plunge and look for an Electric Lime LJ. Jackson and my other boy are both tall dudes so we need the legroom.

Here it is when we first bought it:

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Those decals have to go, and eventually I’d like to get rid of the factory side steps and install some decent sliders, ideally with a built in step.

It has some sort of lift and 33x12.50 tires, though it still has the factory gearing so it’s a real dog, especially at 9000 feet. This is an automatic so thinking 4.88 gears would be about right. I’ll probably do at least 1 locker at the same time as the gear swap.

I don’t plan on hard core rock crawling with this rig but there are hundreds of miles of cool old mining roads where I live and I’d like to be able to tackle the majority of them without too much trouble. And it would be fun to haul it out to Moab, which is one reason I’m setting it up for flat towing.

Short term the ball joints are getting a bit noisy and at 113k miles I plan to replace the OPDA as preventative maintenance.

Any advice on good, affordable setups for a very capable trail rig that’s still daily drivable would be great.
 
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Got all the flat tow stuff set up and working. We’re going to be rolling heavy heading to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving. :)

As I was routing the brake light wiring I noticed the cat back exhaust was in bad shape, so I flat towed it down to the exhaust shop as a test run. The Rock Hard Freedom bumper with the Blue Ox attachments fit my tow bar perfectly, and I mounted the tail light connector and breakaway switch on either side.

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Yes! Another electric lime green brother! Great looking Jeep. I really like that bumper too. 👍🏻
 
PRNDL said:
Yes! Another electric lime green brother! Great looking Jeep. I really like that bumper too. 👍🏻
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Thanks! It'll get a winch eventually but I want to plan out the rest of the front end before I go there so I only have to take everything apart and put it back together once. First priority was the flat tow setup and I'm pretty happy with how that turned out.
 
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