Now for the JCR Ultimate Mall-Crawler Only Sliders
While spotting my wife through the 1 obstacle on Red Elephant the passenger side rocker set down on top and beside a nice big rock. And I literally mean, set down. It didn't slam down hard, in fact it went so smoothly onto the rock it didnt even make a sound. The Jeep pivoted on said rock as we tried to get the Jeep oover the next rock before finally admitting defeat and just winching through like everybody else. Afterwards I went to open the back door and was shocked to realize that just by leaning the Jeep into/on this rock my tubing on my rocker guard was now interfering with the door. Here is the aftermath:
You can see a nice big dent in the the tubing and in the door itself back where the tubing meets the rocker
The door now drags across the tube when you open it
Here you can see how it caused the entire rocker to fold in and deform
Even better in this pic, notice how the rocker was pushed in so much that the bottom edge of the door doesn't meet it at all
Here you can see how the plating from the slider actually caused the the sheet metal to tear as it pushed in
This also caused the backside going into the inner fender to deform outward with a nice jagged point
That nice jagged point decided to take my nearly new Krawler and tear it to shreds, so there goes 450$ worth of tire being chewed to crap by 450$ worth of useless slider
To make matters worse in my mind was the fact that all the other XJ's in our group pivoted along that rock in almost the exact same manner. Not only did the guys running traditional under the rocker sliders not suffer any damage, but my buddy running the same lift/tire size as me and no slider what so ever didn't suffer anything more than just a simple dent in his rocker. These "Ultimate" sliders actually caused me to suffer more damage than the guy w/o any rocker protection at all!
So yeah, tomorrow I'm going to a buddy's shop that has floor anchors and we're going to try to pull the rocker back down and out. I'll patch it up for now but over the winter these hunks of junk are getting cut off and I'm going with the 2x6 square tube rocker replacement method I should have done in the first place. So much for keeping the Jeep all nice.
