FULL SIZE PICS

I went home and took some measurements and determined that a Scout Dana 44 rear would be close enough to the width of the cut Dana 44 front. I located one locally within a few days, picked it up, and brought it home. I then stripped the brake components off of both units and called Pat to come and pick them up to do the narrowing, refurbishing, and matching of the gear ratios. I then began work on the frame removing the bent & rusty rear crossmember and the front spring bracketry. I had decided to go spring-over (SOA) with Wrangler springs. The front Dana 44 was already setup that way, but the spring pads on the rear Dana 44 would need to be relocated. I picked up a front shackle reversal, dual front shock hoop kit, and modified (for YJ springs) Slickrock rear shackle hangers from MORE and a replacement heavy duty rear crossmember and Kentrol stainless steel differential covers from 4WD Hardware. It was around this time that I realized that Pat really couldn't setup the axles correctly without the frame, so I called him up and he came over and picked up the frame and my boxes of assorted goodies (did I mention that his shop is only 2 miles down the street from me?).

While Pat was working away, I continued buying and selling and trading parts and doing research and decided to go with four wheel disc brakes. A kit (caliper brackets, spacers, bolts, rotors) was ordered up from TSM and Cadillac Eldorado calipers with integral parking brake were purchased locally. The 6 lug stuff on the front axle was replaced with 5 lug hubs & rotors from a Ford F-150 and topped off with Warn Premium manual hubs to keep the Jeep 5 on 5.5" bolt pattern. I also started seriously looking into retro-fitting a '87-'95 Wrangler tub in order to keep some of the project costs down. I located a tub from an '87 that had survived a frontal 3/4 collision on the passenger side that was repairable, and headed out to Iowa the following Saturday morning to pick it up and stumbled across the rollbar from a '94 YJ while I was walking around and grabbed that as well. Since I would need to have a couple of mounts moved on the frame to properly accomodate it, the tub was delivered to Pat for fitting. The mounts directly in front of the rear wheels were moved forward and spaced 3/4" out from the frame in order to match up with the mounting locations on the tub.

Finally in the early part of December, Jeepskate was ready to come back home...to be torn back down again. I had some worn out 31's that I had laying around mounted on Alter Ego's old wheels and we mounted those up to Jeepskate and trailered it back up the street and into the driveway. We pushed it in the garage (it barely cleared the door), I took a few pictures, and we closed the door. Mother Nature had abruptly informed us that it was indeed Winter by turning cold that morning and dumping several inches of snow on us. I bought a small heater to keep the garage warm enough to thaw out the tub, and basically piddled around cleaning things up and removing items that I wouldn't be using...

Onward to Phase 3: