Bad Case of Jeep Envy

So I'm back in school these days working on a master's certificate. One of the areas that I park on campus, I've noticed this really tricked out black jeep. It's pretty well built up, but at the same time, looks as though it has never seen an unpaved road. I'm not knocking it, because save for three days out in Utah, my truck is overwhelmingly a street queen as well just with some offroad potential. Anyway, of the things I noted about this Jeep was that he had the hood-mounted high lift jack. And it looks bad @ss.

Now, I already had a high lift jack. The only time I used it was while performing the body lift for my truck. Specifically, I used it to lift the bed off of the frame (one side at a time), by placing a piece of plywood to bridge across the arch of the rear wheel well with the jack centered along the midspan. Other than that, I don't really have any suitable jacking points on the truck as it lacks sliders or a heavy duty bumper. I could probably jack from either of the receiver hitches if the need really arose.

Well, I decided to take on the mod this past weekend. The primary motivation was really to find a place to relocate my 'camp lights' down from the roof rack to a lower point to aid me in parking in commercial garages. The idea of the jack mount was just an added bonus.

I had read that the hood is structurally a poor place to mount a jack. The metal is just not very stout in this area. I thought I had a design approach which overcame this. The first night it performed well on a test run to Home Depot to pick up a little more split loom to conceal the balance of the wiring running from the hood back up to a junction point at the roof. Today, however, on the drive back from the stadium (a loss for my beloved 'Skins) there was a lot more flexing of the hood metal. I'm thinking of filling the hood with the expanding foam stuff that I filled the nerf bars and bull bar with. It is a bit of a messy operation; so, I'll probably wait to tackle it during daylight hours when I've got a bit more energy.

I'll do a build page for it. It'll start with a word of caution to NOT try this unless you've got a better plan of attack then I did.

If form sometimes can win over function, then I'm happy with it as it looks pretty bad @ss on my truck now too. And given that I'll probably only ever take this truck on Green Level trails or accessing up to camp sites, the work should hold up pretty well.

There's also a bit of a segue/segway here:

A couple of weeks back I made the drive down to Iron Pig Offroad and picked up a rear carrier pivot assembly. I'm going to build a swing-out tire carrier to carry a spare and two jerry cans (one fuel, one water). Most folks will also include a mount for the high lift jack. I thought I was clever and was finding a way to minimize the load on the hinge already imparted by the wheel and two, 5-gallon cans. It wasn't a bad idea, just not the best idea either. Check out the page for the Hood-mounted Jack for the Frontier for a few more pics and synopsis.