97+ door striker mod how-to

[jeff351]

So you decided to swap over the doors from a 97+ XJ to your MJ. Simple enough, unbolt, lug over, bolt back on.

Other than the trivial details like wiring and shimming to get it lined up, the main challenge here are the door strikers; MJ used the pin-style, and the XJ uses the modern U-style catch and they are not compatible.

 

Step 1 - remove the MJ striker and install the XJ doors.

Step 2 - once you get the doors adjusted where there is an even gap all around, you need to find the centerline of the new striker position. Lean down and get your eye level with the latch mechanism in the door. Close it as much as you can, then take a marker and put a mark on the body of the MJ centerline where the latch will catch the striker. Arrow here points to the sharpie mark on the body.

 

 

 

Step 3 - You now need to set your depth of where the striker will mount. 2 ways: measure off the body of the donor XJ, or drill a few holes and attach the striker temporarily using sheet metal screws (this is how I did it.) You have a little wiggle room as the XJ striker allows a good 1/4" of adjustment up-down-in-out. The red line below is my center line from step 2. 

(below picture also shows after I also traced where to cut)

 

 

 

 

 

Step 4 - cut out the striker from the XJ. Give yourself plenty of extra material to work with. Once you get it out, you can find-tune it. You want to trim the new striker as narrow as you can since you have limited space to work with in this area on the MJ.

 

 

Step 5 - since i drilled a few holes and found a spot where the striker was lined up pretty darn close, I then drew a cross-hair on the striker to get it lined up with the correlating drill hole in the body.  Then hold the cut-out piece on the body and trace it with a sharpie. Next you just cut out the area where this will weld into. It gets tricky here since there isn't a lot of room and you don't want to cut more than you need. I had to get creative with my tool choice. 

 

 

Step 6 - Fine tune the hole size with a metal file so it fits with a very fine gap; the body sheet metal here is super-thin 22 gauge so you have to be careful and not put a lot of heat in when welding it up.

 

 

Step 7 - tack weld it, bolt in the striker, and give it a test. If all goes well, all you have to do now is finish welding it up. If you didnt remove your interior, take it slow and let it cool in between spot welds; you don't want to melt your trim. In this picture you can see where a spot weld fell out above the hole, so I just drilled it out and welded in a plug. 

 

Step 8 - grind the welds down and do a little finish work and DONE!