JK tube doors on XJ with pics

NCCherokee

NAXJA Forum User
Location
Anderson, SC
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So I’ve been wanting tube doors ever since I made the doors removable like 10 years ago. Didn’t really like any of the off the shelf options for cherokees. The warrior products doors were probably the best looking, but they were too expensive. After parking next to a JK one day, are started wondering if JK doors would fit with a little modification. Turns out, the door openings are really close.

I still thought I might need to cut and section and reweld the doors. To my pleasant surprise this was unnecessary. I purchase these doors for about $300


Basically all I needed to do was relocate the hinges. On wranglers the hinges are exterior of course, so I cut off the original mounting bracket where the hinge pins bolt onto the door. I used some steel laying around, including some old spring perches from an old trailer to build out the new brackets for the hinge pins
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The lower brackets need to be a little deeper due to the shape of the A pillar. A 2x6 piece of tube cut in half was about perfect. Welded the pins directly to avoid hassling with bolts.
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Now the pins are too short to go through both hinge holes, but it’s not really necessary. Might have helped lining them up a little better but it works fine.

Even the jk latch location matches up with the door striker. There is some adjustability to fine tune after some welding.
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The snubbers (missing in the picture above) don’t line up with the body, haven’t decided if I am going to relocate them or not. As seen in the first pic, the JK doors curve up at the corners. I decided not to bother with building it out to match better. I may do so in the future, and it would be the perfect spot for the snubbers, but even without them, the doors don’t really rattle. Standard tj mirrors, and I assume jk mirrors, will bolt right up. Unfortunately after owning those mirrors for about 8 years, I broke the driver side glass, so waiting on new glass to show up.

Pumped! Love driving door less but definitely feel more secure. I feel like I can drive the kids in it now.

I’m gonna wait on the rear doors for now, just because our youngest probably is still too young for the rear doors to come off, but eventually we’ll get them.
 
Nice! Great option considering the time and materials to make your own, price might be worth it to just do this.
Spent about 4 hours on it yesterday. Knocked the passenger door out in half the time. Figured it was a bit of a $300 gamble but one I was willing to take
 
No rattle with normal driving, but there can be a bit on potholes. The snubbers don’t make contact, but I could probably extend the mounts about 2 inches and the would contact the door sill and provide some compression to eliminate the rattle. I’ll drive it for a while before deciding if I care enough. The xj probably gets a 500 miles a year these days most of that pulling a trailer
 
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