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Technical / Installation Articles - Body Interior / Exterior


AJ's Offroad Armor Super Sliders

Article written by Adventure Bob

Date Added: 09/13/2009

Many Grands look like they?ve been in an accident if you wheel 'em in the rocks. To avoid this, we hit up AJ, AJs Off Road Armor, to put some real (made to be used) sliders between the tender under body and the rocks.

There are very limited choices for real sliders when it comes to protecting a Grand Cherokee. You know the kind that won't fold up like cheap lawn furniture the first time it gets between your ride and the rocks? Well we went searching forums, magazines, and word of mouth, we kept hearing great things about AJs Super Sliders. A brief chat on the phone and we ordered up one set of Super Sliders for our Grand Cherokee project vehicle, the Gopher.
 

Installation

1. Unwrap the sliders and make sure you have 8 self tapping 7/16 bolts, 8 1/4 in bolts, nuts, washers and lock washers.

2. Position the sliders under the vehicle--we suggest using a jack, but a couple of friends will work as well.
 The short end of the slider goes forward

3. Center the slider under the vehicle. To be specific and uniform, we mounted ours 1 1/8 inches in front of the rear wheel well arch.
 This position gave us the flattest mount surface on the frame rail and positioned the sliders nearly dead center

4. Push the frame rail mount plates up as far as you can against the underside of the vehicle and mark the bolt holes with a sharpie or black spray paint.
 We had to scrape a little bit of the undercoat from the framerail to get the mount plates all the way up and flat against the frame rail

5. Lower the sliders out of the way, center punch the holes and drill 8 21/64 holes in the frame rails.
 We used an angle drill for clearance. While it can be done with a regular drill, this made it much simpler.

6. Notch the pinch seam with a grinder where the horizontal supports cross underneath. Paint the area to prevent rust.
 This won't be a necessity on all Grands, but ours made contact preventing flush contact along the pinch seam

7. Raise the slider back into position and install the 8 self tappers. Using the jack, apply upward pressure on the slider until the pinch seam bracket is all the way up against the bottom of the Jeep. With the slider in place, drill the holes for the 1/4 inch bolts from the inboard side of the Jeep and into the existing holes in the bracket.
 This prevents a bunch of extra work trying to mark the holes from the outboard side (damn near impossible!)while the sliders are up

8. Install the 4 bolts, washers, lockwashers and nuts.

9. Repeat for the other side, go out and wheel!

Installation Issues

We really had none, but if we were asked for a wish list: we'd like a way to get away from the self tapping bolts. We'd also like to figure out a way to keep the transit key holes for tying the Gopher to the trailer. In the pic you can see the keyhole and the four mounting bolt holes that bolt the plate to the frame rail directly over the keyholes. AJ has said he'd look into a possible solution for the the transit key issue. We still haven?t come up with a good solution for eliminating the self tappers yet, but were working on it.

Final Thoughts

AJ's Off Road Armor ships their sliders unpainted, to save you a little cash. We intend to use red Rustoleum that is a near perfect match for the Gophers Chrysler red paint. Rustoleum also makes touch up after abuse a very simple process that won?t cost you an arm and a leg.

So far these sliders have been wheeled in anger once without an issue. We'll keep beating them and see how they hold up over time. In the next installment of the Gophers progress we should have them completely painted so you can see how they look in a color other than black. Over all, the installation was easy, the product is well made and so far they have proven tough; we'd buy 'em again.

 

Purchase / Vendor Info

Vendor Name: AJ''s Offroad Armor
Address: 9521 Hill Road
Fayette, IA 52142
Phone: 563-425-4599
Contact Person: AJ
E-Mail Address:
Website: http://www.ajsoffroadarmor.com/
 

Our Thank You's!

We'd like to thank AJ for working with us on this project.


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