Got to play around in the shop a little yesterday. First, I can’t wait to have the Jeep done. I love working on my Jeep, but this has interrupted my steevo bench build so I’m excited to move past the 5-speed conversion and start working ON the shop again.
Anyway, in order to start pulling apart the donor, I need to get my XJ ready. I had started working on the headliner and now I have pieces to the XJ all over the place. Sunday morning I was able to get the new headliner fabric laid out over the fiberglass part of the headliner:
I’ve never had good luck installing headliners so hopefully this holds. It appears to be on there pretty good. I got the holes cut out (and totally forgot that the front edge of the headliner doesn’t have trim covering it so that looks like total s%#t but at least I have the sun visors to hide some of that). I got it put back up in the roof of the Jeep and I got the new speakers installed. At Best Buy they had 6 1/2″ Pioneer speakers on sale for $37 so I bought some. Sounded pretty decent for cheap speakers and anything is better than the factory XJ speakers.
Once the head liner was in I started putting plastic trim pieces back in and I broke both of the mounts on one of the upper pieces. That stopped me for a while. We went down to a pick n’ pull salvage yard in Des Moines and they didn’t have a single XJ 97+ with matching interior. On the way home from a family day I stopped and got some JB weld. When we got home I got the plastic clips JB Welded back on. In addition, when cleaning up the surface rust in the floor pans so I can paint the interior floors with the same farm implement paint I used on the underbody, I found a hole in the passenger side floor about 1/16th of an inch in diameter. Well, I had the JB weld out so I just filled it with that. It was way too small of a hole to get the welder out, but just big enough that it irritated me. I figure the JB should hold well enough for this, plus it’s getting paint on top and bottom of it.
Here’s the JB Welded floor:
And here’s the proof I plan on presenting to the wife that I need more clamps:
The JB sets in about 5 minutes but takes 4-6 hours to cure so that was it for the night. Tonight I’m going to paint the floor boards and get the front speakers wired up and tested.