my two door Jeep Wrangler JK does not have the back seat and I end up throwing all sorts of loose items including tools in the rear compartment. In the event of a roll over the items will fly everywhere. To remedy this I started building a bank of drawers that attach to the stock seat mounts. First I built a simple mild steel bracket. The bracket will capture a piece of 80/20 extruded aluminum that will act as the foundation of the box. I followed the contour of the inner Jeep fender with a flexible drafting tool and transferred the shape to a piece of 3/4" plywood.
Next was fitting the drawer face. After the drawer face was fitted I wrapped the material with heavy black vinyl that matches the interior material.
This is where I ended my Sunday afternoon project. Next up building the drawers and finishing the vinyl and carpet installation as well as two access panels for the top.
Work continued today on my Jeep storage box. Today I did the upholstery and installed the drawer sliders.
After the holidays I will build the drawers and have a pretty good idea for the drawer fronts. This project is just about wrapped up. Two Sunday's worth of work watching football and I have a pretty cool storage container for my jeep.
Work continued on this project and finished it up the last couple weeks. I am just now getting around to loading these up. I built the drawers out of a quality plywood.
I wanted to do something with the drawer fronts to make the storage box look more durable and like it belonged in a vehicle (not a kitchen) so I decided to craft the drawer fronts out of a metallic material. Aluminum seemed a good fit. I cut the drawer fronts to size with a bandsaw and than ran them through my router table to put the edge on them. The router table worker very well for this but you need to be careful. I cleaned up the drawer fronts with various grades of sand paper and than hit them with Never Dull. I am not sure if I like the finish yet so I did not go crazy on making them shine. I suspect I will take these to powder coat at some point. Perhaps anodized finish?
The boxes have a tendency to fly open when you get some weight in them, so I added a lock to each of them. This also allows me to store valuables in them when the top is off the Jeep.
The storage unit turned out great, notice the top access panels allow additional storage in the sides for soft goods.
Now I just need to organize the items into the new drawers. I am using foam to dampen the noise and cutting out locations for each item. My hope is that these will stay put and not bounce around.
