The Doors

No, not the guys wailing on the electric organ but the removable barrier kind of doors. My YJ didn't come with the more accurate half-doors, so this needed to be remedied immediately! Off to eBay!

I promptly found some on eBay for a rather reasonable price, but the listing said "local pickup only" and it was quite far for me to pickup. Hrrm... I read the description (always an important thing to do!) and it said something somewhat ambiguous like, "I will help out with shipping and handling." Curious. I emailed the seller about shipping them, and he said he'd be happy to do so. I offered to pay whatever the shipping fees were, but, as far as I recall, he never requested anything beyond the price of the auction. The doors showed up in extremely door-shaped packages with USPS labels slapped on them. They were undamaged and seemed to be as described. Sweet! Positive feedback for you, eBay seller!

So, Andross, you show your true form

I knew that the door panels weren't the correct color, and I knew there was a "hunter green" spray paint color popular in the JP Jeep builders community for being pretty close to the Sahara green color, so I had planned on painting them. The pictures of the doors on the auction listing were taken outside in rather bright light, so I assumed they were the tan color from a '95 Sahara, and the reason for them appearing to be oddly light in color was a combination of the bright sunlight, poor photography, and just being old and faded. Once I received them it was obvious they had been rattle-canned. I chipped some of the paint off and experienced tentative excitement. I quickly removed the panels from the doors to see the backs and, lo and behold, they were actually Sahara green! Heck yeah!

Also these doors came with free tools hidden inside the panels! All right! (There's no telling what Jeep owners will put in weird places in their Jeeps.)

Stripping that paint completely was a chore to say the least. I didn't want to use anything that could damage the plastic panel, so that seemed to limit my options. I found on a model painting forum some discussion of oven cleaner removing paint without damaging plastic. I gave that a shot. It worked somewhat but not as well as I had hoped. It ended up taking a lot of scrubbing, scraping, pressure washing, and who knows what else to remove that paint (and there are still small remnants in the nooks and crannies). Once it was all removed I could see why they had been painted in the first place.

Eesh. That doesn't look great, and it wasn't just appearance either. It had an almost fuzzy feeling to it. It was weird.

Right around that time, a video from one of the forefathers of JP replica vehicle building, Cyrix9445, came to my attention. This video was about cleaning up Jeep door panels with similar weird, chalky fading! He used a Magic Eraser, which is some kind of mildly abrasive sponge thing with soap or something in it. I used nearly an entire package of them, but they worked surprisingly well.

A little splotchy and uneven in places, but miles ahead of where they were. Those pouches were nasty but cleaned up pretty well with soap and water.

We needed locking mechanisms on the vehicle doors

In another bout of "what the heck do people do to their Jeeps?", one of these new-to-me doors was entirely missing the rod that connected the lock switch to the locking mechanism itself. This seemed... odd, to say the least. I couldn't find any purpose-built replacement parts (at least reasonably priced) for this, so I had to improvise. A length of, I believe, 1/8" welding rod and some big pliers did nicely. Working lock switch! And it doesn't even feel sloppy! Bonus!

However, I had no key for these locks. I considered swapping the locks that were on the Jeep's full doors, but I kind of liked the idea of having both kinds of doors. I looked into what was involved in re-keying the locks. It didn't seem too complicated, but it was probably going to need tumbler pins. The pins can be had, but usually in bulk packs marketed to locksmiths at not unreasonable prices, considering, but a bit much just to do my two measly locks. So I contacted a local auto locksmith about doing it for me. I don't remember what specifically was said, but I explained that I wanted some really old Jeep door locks re-keyed, and he acted like this was a nigh-insurmountable act, the likes of which should never be attempted by mortals. I was rather confused by this reaction.

I live in Backwater, USA, so there weren't really any other options. So I proceeded to take the lock tumblers apart myself.

I was on a roll with these doors: the locks already had the exact pins I needed to match my key. I just needed to rearrange them. It was really easy. I was absolutely shocked. I didn't have to spend a dime to re-key my locks! Score! Note though that it's easy to ruin the black metal plate that holds the tumbler within the lock assembly. They're held in by small tabs that have to be bent out to remove. I was lucky enough to be able to re-use them.