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Here's a better update for you guys on the Jeep... Since the Pro Comp spacer lift went in, it's been armored up a bit more and beaten pretty hard. We set it through its paces on some black diamond trails out at Flat Nasty Off-road Park in Missouri, and we're very impressed with how well it held its own. As soon as we go through the footage we'll put a video together highlighting it.
I wasn't able to get out of work on Friday until 6pm, so we shot straight down to our cabin as soon as we were packed up, and settled in for the night. The next morning, we put the Teraflex diff covers on the front and rear and set out on some trails, mostly taking it easy all day, aside from on black diamond that left some scars on our hard top. Sunday was a full day of wheeling, though, and it proved just how capable the rubicon is... Even stock. We left Sunday evening with plenty of battle scars, but drove home smooth and straight at 80mph all the way back. We'll post some pics here for the thread:

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Riding the stock rock rails... We proved the need for armor on all sides...

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Putting the diff covers in outside of the cabin, in the mud, was not the best option, but we made it work.

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We certainly are not! We relate to Mr. Shelby quite a bit, actually:

"These cars are meant to be driven", so enjoy the hell out of all of it - not just the look of it when it is all clean" - Carroll Shelby

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It's time to catch everyone up on the build. Of course, most of the build is available on YouTube.com/CrawlTV but not all of it. We'll start with where we left off.

After the Flat Nasty trip, I drove around for the next couple of weeks with no front left fender because the fender had been ripped off, along with the fender liner, when we were on our very last trail of that weekend. At some point we both had the same day off, so we found the time to make a fender trimming video (although we still haven't compiled the footage for it) and got the Jeep looking good again. The rear fenders remained stock until later down the road, so for a while, I just rocked the trimmed fronts. It was all done using some tape, a sharpie, a Dremel, a knife, some spray paint, and a couple rolls of black edge trim from O'Reilly's.

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After the fender trim, the next thing that we battled was a bad O2 sensor. That was a quick and easy fix that only took about 15 minutes in the driveway. In fact, having the fenders trimmed made it extremely easy to access! I'm not a big fan of doing actual maintenance repairs on a 2 month old (to us) Jeep, but there's no way that anybody can predict when and how a sensor will fail... Rather than race back up to the dealership, we just fixed it ourselves. We even made a video of it at YouTube.com/CrawlTV

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With no big repairs to do, and the lift kit still on hold, I decided to pull the Jeep into the shop to fix something that's been bothering me. The DynaBeads that we installed on one of our YouTube videos were not balancing the wheels out very well, and I was receiving a TON of shaking feedback in the steering wheel. My solution was to dismount the tires, remove the Dynabeads, balance them dynamically with weights on the inner lip and sticky weights inside, and then dismount them on one side again and pour the beads back in. Let me tell you... Doing that with five 35" tires was a huge pain in the rear. All said and done though, it made a really big difference, and now there is absolutely no shaking while driving. That's another one of the most things that I just haven't gotten around to making a video for yet. In retrospect, I would not have run Dynabeads again, given the same chance. It was basically a $135 experiment that ultimately was not satisfying. If I ever decide to run beadlocks, then I may consider purchasing them again, but otherwise, I think I'd pass.

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The last mod that we made prior to lifting the Jeep was a front bumper trim. We made a 5 minute video of it, but it was extremely straight-forward and looks killer. Of course, it's still a plastic bumper and we plan on replacing it when we get the chance, but for the time being, we're very happy with it. The replacement bumper ends are from VDP (vertically driven products). They have a website at VDPUSA.com, but we actually bought the bumper ends on Amazon. Here's the finished product of that:

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NOW... The thing that I mostly wanted to write about: The Lift! My wife, Grace and I installed a full Synergy 4.5" lift on the Jeep right here in our driveway.

As a quick back- story, we waited for three months while our rear Fox shocks were on back order. The whole reason for installing the 1.75" Pro Comp spacer lift was just to run 35s until the rear lift showed up, but we had no idea how long that was going to take. Now, at the job that I was at, I only ever had Sundays off, so we decided that on the first two day weekend that I got after our shocks arrived, we were going to start the lift. That weekend finally came for us, and we were ready to hit the project with full force. That Friday night, we laid out every single part of the lift on the garage floor, to be fully prepped for the next day.

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Saturday morning showed up and turned into afternoon before we ever got started... We were up so late that Friday night that we didn't get to bed until around 3am. Keep in mind, since we filmed every second of the install, we had a lot that had to go into prepping. There were also a few beers consumed while we unboxed every part of the lift and laid them out exactly as they'd go on the Jeep on the garage floor. The lift started out very optimistically, with the both of us making an intro for the video, blocking the rear wheels and jacking up the front end, but by the end of Saturday, all we'd accomplished was removing parts. Not to mention, we still had to replace the brake lines and drill the knuckle for the high-steer kit as well.