Sawzalls. Cut-off wheels. Body Saws. Plasma cutters.

Just the mention of these tools makes the hands of the experienced project builder twitch with excitement. It all gets serious when the cutting begins cuz there is no going back. In order to get the 37s, the wheelbase stretch, and the 4" lift to live in happiness together, I needed to trim a bit of interfering sheetmetal. As you can see from the pics below, the rear tires were juuuust touching the bottom of the fender lip so I used the flare that I took off the rear opening of the YJ and turned it around so the more angular shape sat against the body. I traced the shape with a sharpie extending it along the body till I had the basic shape I wanted. If you care about the paint, use blue painters masking tape first so you can mark to your hearts content and then, afer cutting, remove the tape. Once I was satisfied, I took my 4 1/2" angle grinder and a thin cut wheel and cut out the interfering parts on the drivers side. Make sure you check for wires, gas lines, etc before you get to cutting.

In order to get the passenger side the same, I took a piece of poster board and taped it against the cut out section, marked it from the back with a sharpie and then cut it out with scissors. I transferred the shape over to the other side of the Jeep, lined up the edges of the poster board to guidelines I had established and then traced along the edge to the body. A quick check with the tape measure and off it came.

If you dropped a plumb line off the back of the rear sheetmetal edge of the Jeep at the tailights/gas filler area, the edge of the tire is about 1-2" inside that. As far as getting the opening exactly right, I will cover the side and corners of the Jeep with something like the Gen_Right 3/16" corner guards shown above . that will allow me to trim the 3/16" covering to the final shape I want based on getting the Jeep out and flexing it out. Following that will be tube fenders.

Now that I had that cut, I needed to make sure I could work out the space for the gas filler neck, the taillights, and the hinges for the swing out tire carrier. The filler neck needed to move so the tire would not hit when flexed upwards. You can see the results here for that little challenge. As you can see, I really had to squeeze the oval LED truck/trailer lights in juuuust below the inner step and above the filler neck. I spliced the new turn/stop/tail LED light into the stock wiring using a new plug that comes with the lights. I also pigtailed a extra light off of the tailight circuit for a future running light to be mounted on the rear/side corner. The back-up light wire was broken out and will be used on each side on a separate light.