I have a 09 Sahara 2door. It's a daily driver that likes to have fun on the weekends. I'll mostly wheel in mud and fire roads. But would like to do some rock crawling. I should make a tool kit and maybe get a CB. Also the underbody protection is a good idea cause I don't want to hurt anything expensive. From what I read, after getting protection, I'll get a lift with the idea of what size tires I want. Then with the new coils they will support a heavy bumper/winch. Then if I start doing more night runs then would be the time for lights.

For a lift I'm thinking 2-3 inches that will be able to fit 35s. What are y'alls thoughts on different shocks and coils combos. I like the rancho Rs9000 shocks because you can adjust them for what you are doing. Does any body know how the bilstein's 5100?

Thanks!

 

Best advice here. Take it offroad first and you'll find you need a lot less than you may think to have fun with it. I was pleasantly surprised the first time with mine. I had grand aspirations before ever taking it offroad, the first time offroad greatly mitigated those.

 

When I first went off roading in mine I realized probably the most important thing I could get for mine was rock rails. Coming over rocks and tree stumps put a beating up under my doors pretty well. (Luckily didn't do any damage.) That was the first thing I wanted to get for a long time.

I decided to go ahead and sink the money into bigger tires and a lift though instead just to get it up in the air and make it look meaner.

If you're going to be doing a lot of mudding mostly with some fire roads...etc, You need a mud terrain or all terrain tire at the least to help you out with that. If I were you I would do this...


You can run 35'' tires without a lift if you:
1.) Cut fenders into flat fenders
2.) Cut pinch seams
3.) Cut front bumper to a stubby bumpers.

All those are free, you just got to buy the tires which you can mount to your stock rims. That would be the cheapest way to get you a little more clearance with bigger tires and change the look of it. However, you could also do a 2.5'' budget boost for roughly $150 - $300 or so depending on which you go with. That too is pretty cheap. You might need to add in labor cost if you don't install it yourself though. If you still have more money to spare, you could do a more proper complete kit for a little more money.

You could do something like that and do more trails and mudding and steer clear of rocks until you got rock rails for some protection unless they're smaller rocks since you'll have more ground clearance. It'll look meaner, bigger, better, and be a little more capable off road than it is now and it could be done pretty cheap. All just depending on the type of tire you decide to go with. If you don't do 35's, you could do 33's and not have to cut anything on your jeep. 35's in my opinion, make it look quite a bit better though. relatively speaking, you could have a pretty nice looking rig with this and still have fun wheeling it for a very small amount of money comparatively speaking to what most of us want to do to our jeeps.


Lights and everything else is all cool and all, but it's only prolonging what we all really want in the end... a bigger lift kit and bigger badder tires. I'd rather sink money into getting me closer towards what I really want rather than a bunch of smaller mods that wont help me out with my overall main goal as much. It'll just mean that I have to wait that much longer, and save up that much more money. That's just me though.