I Drilled 58 Holes In My Truck Body ?

[JTenn]

Let us know when you test the dent protection. I bet that's more cringe worthy. looks awesome.

Thanks. It's bound to happen eventually. But hopefully it won't hurt as bad next time.

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[JTenn]

This is part of my next project as well, so to hear someone else voice what's going through my head just in the planning stages is wild. Last time I had to cut/drill anything on my JT, I had to psych myself up for it beforehand, I'm hoping this time is easier.

To the discussion on loctite - I was helping a buddy install corner armor (it's way easier to cut/drill someone else's rig) and was told to put it on the outer wall of the rivnut near the rim before inserting them into the body panel, supposedly helps it bind to the sheet metal after you crimp them in place. But for the bolts themselves, oh hell no.

It's funny you mentioned being easier to work on someone else's rig because I was just about to say that. I once drilled holes in a buddy's brand new HD Roadglide to mount a luggage rack on the tour pack. He had to look away. I loudly said OH SHIT and I thought he was going to have a heart attack. Lol ?

 

[Sweetums]

It's funny you mentioned being easier to work on someone else's rig because I was just about to say that. I once drilled holes in a buddy's brand new HD Roadglide to mount a luggage rack on the tour pack. He had to look away. I loudly said OH SHIT and I thought he was going to have a heart attack. Lol ?

Easy there, Satan.

 

[TXJeepDad]

That is awesome that you're making a living working on fun stuff!! I know perspective is everything but there's something cool about not being tied to an office or factory.

I always wanted to do something automotive related, but went into teaching instead (6th grade marh). Decided I don't like teaching anymore and made the switch. Now I talk jeeps and 4x4s at work ?

 

[SargeDiesel]

Nice looking JT; not something that I could/would do. As @PuddleJumper said, that area should already be protected by a good set of sliders that you can trust.

Yeah , agreed. although they are subjectively functional, they really seem to be more for aesteadics.

 

[Tommyd]

It's rocker panel armor. Rocker panels are definitely an area subjected to more potential abuse than say a door or upper bed side. It's just added protection down low for rock, tree, log strikes, etc. I know this has become a long thread but there's a picture of my damaged rocker panel with rock sliders (post 9 I believe) that this armor would have protected had it been installed.

Nice! How thick of metal is it? It must be pretty stout?

 

[JTenn]

Nice! How thick of metal is it? It must be pretty stout?

They are 3/16 or just under 5mm thick.

 

[JTenn]

Yeah , agreed. although they are subjectively functional, they really seem to be more for aesteadics.

True, but the same could be said about most mods we do. There's no question that 5mm thick plate steel is going to be stronger than .015 thick body panels. So yes it is serving 2 purposes. And the aesthetics are subjective. Not everyone's cup o tea but that's cool too. I'm 100% positive the rocker damage I got last year would have not happened had these been installed.

 

[Wolf Island Diver]

Basically, if someone has to always rely on others, even the smallest projects can get very expensive.

I grew up with my father doing 100% of the work on our house and cars. I inherited that same mentality. It’s partly being cheap, it’s partly not trusting people and it’s partly legitimately enjoying the work. Occasionally I encounter something I can’t or won’t do or don’t have the equipment for, e.g., slate roofing work, vehicle alignment, etc., but there’s not much even though I can now afford to pay people. Having operated this way my whole life what blows my mind isn’t that people don’t do all or most of this kind of work themselves. Peoples lack of intellectual curiosity for this realm of knowledge is still odd to me. People have all sorts of different backgrounds and it usually takes a parent to hand down both the skills and mentality towards DIY, which is unfortunate, considering people don’t operate that way when it comes to going to school for something. Most people don’t grow up practicing law either.

It seems to take a certain kind of person to go out and try and tackle something they haven’t done before on their own, outside of a formal, structured setting. For a lot of people that concept is totally foreign. It takes an entirely different kind of person to not only do that but to first actually research and learn how to do it correctly. Some people, maybe a large portion of DIYers have the mentality, or maybe ego, to do things themselves but not to try and educate themselves first to do it correctly. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to parse who is the autodidact with good mechanical skills and who’s the idiot or nutcase especially on the internet. I’ve probably encountered more DIYers that were dangerous idiots (Dunning-Kruger people), than folks that knew their limits and took the time to legitimately expand them. So there’s 2 qualities at play. Willingness to do it yourself and the discipline, intellect and humility to learn before you leap.

Anyway, what does blow my mind is how people, especially not so wealthy folks, afford or justify the insane prices associated with paying someone to do work for them. I get it if you’re rich, because time is money. I’d rather sit by the pool and let someone else do all the work if I was that wealthy aside from the things I legitimately enjoy doing. But middle-class and poor people pay huge sums for simple stuff to be done for them. I somewhat understand the car thing if you don’t have the space or invest in tools or you live in an apartment. But, I still cannot wrap my mind around how anyone who isn’t a multimillionaire with really odd finances, pays someone to do their taxes. Professional tax preparation uses essentially the same software anyone else can use for free. Even sole proprietorship business deductions with accelerated depreciation isn’t rocket science. People are paying H&R Block $350 to do 5 minutes of work to file a 1040EZ. They’re being ripped off. I’ve been doing my own taxes since I was a teenager. There’s no secret to it. The government literally provides instructions. Housework is the same way. Sewing isn’t hard, but a lot of people don’t even know how to fold laundry. Cooking too. It’s crazy how easy it is to make your own condiments, bread (with a machine), etc. You know what’s in it and you save a lot of money. My ex wife couldn’t boil water. I have no idea how she survived on her own.

The other thing that I see is that for a multitude of reasons, the professionals are becoming less so. It’s getting harder to find people to do a lot of the kind of work people don’t do themselves. Try finding a carpenter that actually knows how to hang a door, rather than nail gun in a pre-hung one. This is in part because people like my father are a dying breed (literally). People don’t grow up working on cars with their dad anymore. People don’t learn basic food chemistry, like the difference between baking soda and baking powder and when to use which one, or how to make a soup base, or season things properly. Those people who never did these things with their parents grow up and some of them become mechanics and they’re not as skilled as they otherwise would be. It doesn’t help that we treat vocational education as some kind of lesser track for lower castes. My dumb ass went to college actually thinking naïvely that people went to college to expand their intellect. College is supposed to be vocational training too. It’s just frequently not very good vocational training while simultaneously being less about well rounded educated citizens with a good grasp of wide ranging subjects. So called good schools today are producing CS graduates who can’t code and have basically zero liberal arts knowledge to boot. But this is the track for the supposedly “smart” kids while trades education is all but forgotten.

I worked around people mostly my age and younger building nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. I wouldn’t allow 75% of those “mechanics” as they’re called, to touch my lawn mower, but they’re building some of the most complex systems in existence, and badly, requiring constant rework. They call it the “green labor crisis” There’s also a growing crisis in medicine where medical schools are having a harder time finding people with adequate hand-eye coordination to be surgeons because, in part, few people grow up anymore doing work with their hands. Paradoxically, the need to do things yourself is probably increasing because actual skilled professionals are becoming increasingly rare and they end up butchering your stuff. Software engineering requires the ability to troubleshoot abstract multi-dimensional problems. You learn these skills when you work on things as a child. You learn these skills working on cars. You don’t really learn this in school. It’s almost impossible in my experience to find developers that can adequately debug or test their own code, let alone someone else’s. It’s part of the increasing inshitification of software and the internet. IT people suffer from the same problem.

A more relevant, to this forum anyway, case in point; it’s been my experience and that of other members here, that Stellantis technicians can’t seem to be able to change the f@&$ing oil on an Ecodiesel without cocking it up, making a massive mess and leaving you stranded on the side of the road with a truck throwing codes. It’s dead simple. Put a rag under the oil filter to catch drippings and properly tighten the filter. Hasn’t this always true for an oil change? 25NM is barely wrench tight. I haven’t had a single properly done Jeep Wave oil change. I’m glad I’m doing them myself now. I’m here to say that this truck/engine combo is the single easiest most drama-free (except for the price of parts) oil change I’ve ever done; no stupid strap wrenches crushing the old filter; no having to reach half way to hell to get to the filter; no oddball size oil pan plugs; a little cup to catch the oil from the old filter that you can wipe out. But the techs can’t do it without coating the truck in what seems like a quart of oil and can’t seem to tighten the filter properly. Again, 25NM (19.43 ft-lbs) is almost hand tight. The trajectory of all of these trends is alarming. With “AI”, which IMHO might be the biggest joke/scam yet (and I used write code for autonomous systems) we’re a few generations away from the humans in Wall-E.

 

[RubiNewbCB]

Wish I knew what you were talking about - what's this salt you talk of??

And that is why I will not move back to Michigan!!!

 

[RubiNewbCB]

I grew up with my father doing 100% of the work on our house and cars. I inherited that same mentality. It’s partly being cheap, it’s partly not trusting people and it’s partly legitimately enjoying the work. Occasionally I encounter something I can’t or won’t do or don’t have the equipment for, e.g., slate roofing work, vehicle alignment, etc., but there’s not much even though I can now afford to pay people. Having operated this way my whole life what blows my mind isn’t that people don’t do all or most of this kind of work themselves. Peoples lack of intellectual curiosity for this realm of knowledge is still odd to me. People have all sorts of different backgrounds and it usually takes a parent to hand down both the skills and mentality towards DIY, which is unfortunate, considering people don’t operate that way when it comes to going to school for something. Most people don’t grow up practicing law either.

It seems to take a certain kind of person to go out and try and tackle something they haven’t done before on their own, outside of a formal, structured setting. For a lot of people that concept is totally foreign. It takes an entirely different kind of person to not only do that but to first actually research and learn how to do it correctly. Some people, maybe a large portion of DIYers have the mentality, or maybe ego, to do things themselves but not to try and educate themselves first to do it correctly. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to parse who is the autodidact with good mechanical skills and who’s the idiot or nutcase especially on the internet. I’ve probably encountered more DIYers that were dangerous idiots (Dunning-Kruger people), than folks that knew their limits and took the time to legitimately expand them. So there’s 2 qualities at play. Willingness to do it yourself and the discipline, intellect and humility to learn before you leap.

Anyway, what does blow my mind is how people, especially not so wealthy folks, afford or justify the insane prices associated with paying someone to do work for them. I get it if you’re rich, because time is money. I’d rather sit by the pool and let someone else do all the work if I was that wealthy aside from the things I legitimately enjoy doing. But middle-class and poor people pay huge sums for simple stuff to be done for them. I somewhat understand the car thing if you don’t have the space or invest in tools or you live in an apartment. But, I still cannot wrap my mind around how anyone who isn’t a multimillionaire with really odd finances, pays someone to do their taxes. Professional tax preparation uses essentially the same software anyone else can use for free. Even sole proprietorship business deductions with accelerated depreciation isn’t rocket science. People are paying H&R Block $350 to do 5 minutes of work to file a 1040EZ. They’re being ripped off. I’ve been doing my own taxes since I was a teenager. There’s no secret to it. The government literally provides instructions. Housework is the same way. Sewing isn’t hard, but a lot of people don’t even know how to fold laundry. Cooking too. It’s crazy how easy it is to make your own condiments, bread (with a machine), etc. You know what’s in it and you save a lot of money. My ex wife couldn’t boil water. I have no idea how she survived on her own.

The other thing that I see is that for a multitude of reasons, the professionals are becoming less so. It’s getting harder to find people to do a lot of the kind of work people don’t do themselves. Try finding a carpenter that actually knows how to hang a door, rather than nail gun in a pre-hung one. This is in part because people like my father are a dying breed (literally). People don’t grow up working on cars with their dad anymore. People don’t learn basic food chemistry, like the difference between baking soda and baking powder and when to use which one, or how to make a soup base, or season things properly. Those people who never did these things with their parents grow up and some of them become mechanics and they’re not as skilled as they otherwise would be. It doesn’t help that we treat vocational education as some kind of lesser track for lower castes. My dumb ass went to college actually thinking naïvely that people went to college to expand their intellect. College is supposed to be vocational training too. It’s just frequently not very good vocational training while simultaneously being less about well rounded educated citizens with a good grasp of wide ranging subjects. So called good schools today are producing CS graduates who can’t code and have basically zero liberal arts knowledge to boot. But this is the track for the supposedly “smart” kids while trades education is all but forgotten.

I worked around people mostly my age and younger building nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. I wouldn’t allow 75% of those “mechanics” as they’re called, to touch my lawn mower, but they’re building some of the most complex systems in existence, and badly, requiring constant rework. They call it the “green labor crisis” There’s also a growing crisis in medicine where medical schools are having a harder time finding people with adequate hand-eye coordination to be surgeons because, in part, few people grow up anymore doing work with their hands. Paradoxically, the need to do things yourself is probably increasing because actual skilled professionals are becoming increasingly rare and they end up butchering your stuff. Software engineering requires the ability to troubleshoot abstract multi-dimensional problems. You learn these skills when you work on things as a child. You learn these skills working on cars. You don’t really learn this in school. It’s almost impossible in my experience to find developers that can adequately debug or test their own code, let alone someone else’s. It’s part of the increasing inshitification of software and the internet. IT people suffer from the same problem.

A more relevant, to this forum anyway, case in point; it’s been my experience and that of other members here, that Stellantis technicians can’t seem to be able to change the f@&$ing oil on an Ecodiesel without cocking it up, making a massive mess and leaving you stranded on the side of the road with a truck throwing codes. It’s dead simple. Put a rag under the oil filter to catch drippings and properly tighten the filter. Hasn’t this always true for an oil change? 25NM is barely wrench tight. I haven’t had a single properly done Jeep Wave oil change. I’m glad I’m doing them myself now. I’m here to say that this truck/engine combo is the single easiest most drama-free (except for the price of parts) oil change I’ve ever done; no stupid strap wrenches crushing the old filter; no having to reach half way to hell to get to the filter; no oddball size oil pan plugs; a little cup to catch the oil from the old filter that you can wipe out. But the techs can’t do it without coating the truck in what seems like a quart of oil and can’t seem to tighten the filter properly. Again, 25NM (19.43 ft-lbs) is almost hand tight. The trajectory of all of these trends is alarming. With “AI”, which IMHO might be the biggest joke/scam yet (and I used write code for autonomous systems) we’re a few generations away from the humans in Wall-E.

When the "Black Swan Event" hits, and the Satellites, Networks shutdown, these DIY skills will be priceless, so will the skill of bartering. I had a similar upbringing.

 

[SargeDiesel]

True, but the same could be said about most mods we do. There's no question that 5mm thick plate steel is going to be stronger than .015 thick body panels. So yes it is serving 2 purposes. And the aesthetics are subjective. Not everyone's cup o tea but that's cool too. I'm 100% positive the rocker damage I got last year would have not happened had these been installed.

Yeah, I think all mods are subjective and the owner places the value they hold...

I can see why you are a little more vested in this mod over some others.

You nailed it though, not ever mod is everyone's cup of tea... and this cup is not for me...
Regardless, I agree with you. They do provide both astetics and protection.
As far as your rocker damage... NO WAY to be 100% sure in hindsight , but I would tend to agree with you there also, the rocker probably wouldn't have been damaged, atleast in the same way, but I would be willing to bet, the damage would have migrated to the next closest weakest point... basically were the panel and door meet/end.

Looks like you did a great job on the installation, enjoy.

 

[homerun]

I thought the armor was blue and I wasn’t going to comment on the choice, glad that was just the template and the real armor is black. Lol

 

[JTenn]

I thought the armor was blue and I wasn’t going to comment on the choice, glad that was just the template and the real armor is black. Lol

Lol. No that's actually the tape to help protect the paint during installation. I mean I like blue but that would just mess with my head.

 

[sstuner]

@JTenn, this mod looks great. I agree with you about drilling that 1st hole, again great job.

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