Got some unexpected early news yesterday regarding the McNeil fiberglass fenders. Looks like they're done and have shipped via GreyHound from Cali. No idea how long the transit will take, but I wasn't expecting them to be complete until at least the 6th of March per their original estimate. Definitely cannot wait to get them so I can get everything off the car and get the swap going.
Crossing my fingers that the door-fender gap is on the smaller side of what I have been seeing across these swaps.. some are absolutely atrocious, others came out just slightly larger than factory and something I could definitely live with. Really hoping to not have to fiberglass anything.. but I have material and experience with it in case it comes to it.. time will tell, can't wait!
on a different note, the member buying my front end is also picking up my swing out as well as the roof rack, so I am not scrambling to get everything off and get the first iteration of my own rack on the car. With the current metal prices doing crazy stuff, I wasn't able to get as low as I originally thought, but still not bad. If anyone is interested, it looks like it would be in the $650 range, of course you'd have to do your own painting of the side rails
Unlike my current prinsu rack, I opted to not have built-in feet on the side rails, but rater incorporate a mounting bracket to the cross bars. This will give me quite a bit of adjustment both left/right as well as front/back to really set it like I want. Hopefully the idea works out.. I should also mention that my current cross bars are at 47inches. In order to not have to cut down 10 pieces of cross bar by 1 inch, or pay someone $2-5/cut during purchasing of the rails, I decided to try the rack 1" wider at 48". Thats only .5" per side and looks like I have plenty of room to spare.
Also, one of the main reasons I looked into changing to my own design was providing different mounting points on the side rails. I didn't like having to mount half of my components through slots. So the initial idea I had was to provide holes that I could install rivet nuts into to give me a threaded location down the length of the rack. The last thing to finalize is the exact location and number of cutouts I want prior to sending it off to the laser. This also allowed me to not have the long rails just laser cut without having to be handled for bending the feet, thus cutting some cost.
The coastal rear bumper will be the last to go on, and I also can't wait to get it together. Since my tire carrier will be gone as of March 13th i'll need to get it together pretty quick before I hit the trails later in the month.. I opted just for the bare bumper with no swing outs since I felt very comfortable building my own onto it after my swing out build. Plus it saved me like 700 bucks and I already have just about all the material.. I am finalizing the design of it, but came out looking not far off from Coastals own swing out they offer.
