With the addition of some new 15x8" AR 767 rims with 4" of backspacing, I found that my 31's rubbed the fenders a little more than before (I expected this), so it was time for a little trimming. I decided to start with what I call "stage-one" fender trimming, which is just removing the front wind valence from under the front bumper and then cutting the front fender flares off even with the bottom of the bumper. This is a pretty common mod and one you'll see often on XJ's in 4x4 magazines. "Stage-two" consists of cutting the front quarter panels and flares off even with the top of the bumper, the way that '97+ XJ's come from the factory (eventually I plan to do this too). And "stage-three" then involves moving the flares up and trimming away excess metal below the flares. Greg Friedman did what I would consider "stage-three" fender trimming in his Backcountry XJ feature. note: I just made up these "stages", there's no "official" ranking for fender trimming... Bascially all I did was remove the front valence (already gone in the pic below), pull out my trusty Black&Decker Wizard rotary tool, zip off the bottom of the flares, and then round off the corners.
I just bent the metal support tab up out of the way, when I did the trimming I didn't feel like messing with cutting the tab off (you can see the tab bent up in the above pic). You don't gain a lot of tire clearance with the trimming that I did, but you do gain some. The real problem right now is the horizontal support bracket for the bottom of the quarter panel. I'm not quite bold enough to start hacking away at sheetmetal and do "stage-two" trimming yet, so I may just remove the support bracket or make a new one out of some scrap metal. |
