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2017 Chief Edition Progress Build

4K views 16 replies 7 participants last post by  THORS Recon 
#1 ·
Bought the Jeep new from a dealer because we fell in love with the Chief edition. I know it has some very strong opinions on both sides of the spectrum so some people may hate the look of it ha.

I forgot to take pictures of the stock jeep. However, we all know what a stock car looks like :] My before pictures will start post lift, shocks, and tires.

Here are my "before" pictures which may still be present depending on the progress made.

For reference, the lift is a 2.5 inch Terraflex lift with 9500 Monotube shocks and 34 inch AT Toyo Tires with Black wheels (my boyfriend and I decided on the circular pattern just because we though it looked cooler!)

The reason we stayed with 34 inch tires is because we wanted to keep our stock 3.73 gear ratio and didn't want to regear the jeep. Just too expensive since we wouldn't know how to do it and don't feel we would get a lot out of it considering we do more beach stuff than rock crawling.

Before:






 
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#2 ·
The third thing we did after installing the lift and tires was the front bumper and winch. Here are the results:

Barricade bumper and Rugged Ridge 8500 winch with synthetic rope.

The main problem we ran into while installing the Barricade Bumper was the fog lights. The stock fog lights install much closer to the center of the bumper and are ziptied into place. We ended up cutting the zipties, cutting the electrical wire covering the fog lights and pulling the extra length out of the wire covers. We then recovered them and sealed them with electrical tape and ziptied them to the bumper to secure them. Outside of that, pretty straight forward install minus not having a deep socket to remove the bolts. Had to get a little creative with that to get them off ha!



 
#3 ·
Next on our build is the rear bumper and rear tire carrier. Going with Barricade as well.

After that will be the backup camera installation hopefully going to mount it in the spare tire. Need to figure out how to build a bracket for it after we install the rear bumper and tire carrier.
 
#8 ·
Was looking at the parts for the tire carrier and think I should have installed some before putting the bumper on. May have to redo some work sometime ha. I also regret getting the barricade rear tire carrier wish I went with terra flex. Oh well. Maybe I'll replace it down the road.
 
#12 ·
That pup must've had a bath recently; he/she is almost as white as the top!

Looking good so far. I like the black wheels in contrast with the bright colors of the Jeep.
 
#14 ·
So we had to take the entire bumper off to install the tire carrier because there wasn't enough room. Oops ha! Either way, got it installed today. Decided to remove the stock license plate mount and going to install it on the tire carrier and reroute the stock license plate light to the spare tire carrier with a quick disconnect. That's on my list of to-do's when I get the Navtool and backup camera in the mail. Hopefully will do everything at once considering I still need to install the third break light as well.

Here is the back with the tire carrier now. The license plate is ziptied on for the time being until the mount comes in the mail on Friday.



 
#15 ·
Took apart the interior to start my backup camera installation, third break light install, license plate relocation, and license plate light relocation. Got done with all the navigation wires and ran them through, hooked up Navtool, and then noticed this little critter:

Waiting on Navtool now to see how to fix it and if they will replace it or not. Hopefully they will so I didn't spend $200 on a broken tool! No bueno for sure. Put a dampener in my fun for today


 
#16 ·
Finally finished installing the backup camera and putting everything back together! The PAC system bypass works great out of the box! We made our own mount for the backup camera and placed it at the bottom of the spare tire and it's working great. Love having that backup camera with a larger tire plus dogs. Also installed the rugged ridge circle led third break lights to bring a little uniqueness. Enjoying that as well. No license plate light right now so not necessary legal but I have one I'm going to install at a later date. I don't typically get hassled by the police so :p





 
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