Thank you for the photo, it is very helpful. I took another photo of my tailgate to exactly duplicate your photo so I could analyze what's going on. In the illustration below, my tailgate is at the top and yours is at the bottom. I'll explain all the lines below.
- I used the vertical blue lines to scale and align both photos horizontally. The vertical blue rectangles are used to scale the photos vertically. Using these I was able to get both photos to present identical views for comparison.
- The yellow rectangles I used to verify that the camera positions fwd/back were the same - you can see that the rectangle borders the top of the hinge and is the same distance from the bottom of the hinge in both photos.
- I drew the yellow, red and green lines parallel to my hinge base and leaf, then I duplicated the lines and positioned the duplicates over your hinge. Everything lines up the same on both hinges.
- The white rectangle shows the distance between the tailgate and the reinforcement. Again I drew the initial rectangle over my photo, duplicated it and positioned it over your photo. In both photos the clearance is the same. If there was something wrong with the reinforcement's clearance to the tailgate that caused misalignment, this rectangle would show it.
- The short white line shows the alignment of the tailgate to the body side. On my Jeep, a slight difference is visible, although this I think it more due to the shape of the recess on the body side where the hinge base bolts than any true misalignment. On your photo, a slight misalignment is visible with this line but it doesn't look like much - maybe an extra 1/16". Doesn't appear to be as much of a misalignment as seen in the earlier photo you sent last night. The difference between this image and your earlier misalignment image is a mystery but I think I can clear that up in a moment.
- The green rectangle shows the distance between the plane of the back of the hinge base (yellow line) and the tailgate surface. Again duplicating this rectangle and positioning the duplicate over your photo shows there's actually slightly more space on yours than on mine, but maybe only 1/16". If the tailgate was truly misaligned with the body you would expect this distance to be smaller, not slightly larger. Could be slight differences in the photos, but my conclusion from this rectangle is that the tailgate isn't as misaligned as your earlier photo might seem to show.
- The orange rectangle shows the thickness of the body-side spacers. Pretty much the same here although earlier we noted your spacer might be 0.021" thicker due to the tolerance of the spacer material and that's well within the 0.030" tolerance of the steel plate stock the spacers are made from.
My conclusion from the above analysis is that the MORryde parts are within spec and since several thousand of these have been installed and yours is the first problem like this reported, I don't believe the MORryde parts are the problem. So what could the problem be with your installation?
Take a look at the gap between the tailgate and the body, indicated by the red upside-down "V" and number 8. This gap is very large. The effect of a too-large gap will be that when the tailgate is fully open, it will be further from the body than it should be. You said you think the body-side spacer is too thick, which causes the stay rod to be pulled too far out but the photo analysis shows almost no difference between your Jeep and mine, and mine has been working perfectly for years. But the too-large gap would have the same effect as a too-thick spacer, and is probably pulling your stay rod too far.
It's not only the fault of that gap, as I wrote before the stay rod is a very problematic design - Jeep has issued at least 3 new versions of the stay rod, two TSB's and several new versions of the factory hinges to solve this problem. The earliest versions of the stay rod have extremely little tolerance for misadjustment of the tailgate so if your Jeep has one of the earlier versions that gap probably is enough to pull the stay rod out at full open. In their TSB Jeep recommends replacing the stay rod with the latest version to provide more tolerance for misalignment. You may have one of the earlier rev "low tolerance" stay rods, but you may not need to replace yours.
Now to the question of apparent misalignment of the tailgate with the body as shown in your earlier photo - this apparent misalignment could also be caused by the large gap. In the photo analysis above, the both tailgates appear to be aligned the same with the body, perhaps 1/16" further out on yours but your earlier photo shows an apparent misalignment larger than the possible 1/16" show in the analysis. How can this be? Here's a possible explanation - you know the JK tailgate is curved - here's what happens as you widen the gap (I've exaggerated the curve for this illustration). With a narrow gap, the tailgate appears pretty well aligned, but as the gap widens, and when viewed from the side (green arrow) the apparent misalignment grows.
My conclusions and recommendations...
1. Based on the photo analysis and the fact that thousands have been installed without this problem being reported I don't believe the MORryde parts are the problem.
2. I recommend you adjust the position of the tailgate to minimize the hinge-side gap - move the tailgate closer to the passenger side of the Jeep.
3. If readjustment doesn't fix the problem, you can do two things:
a. Add a washer to further reduce the swing of the tailgate. A 5/16" stainless split lock washer under the outboard screw of one of the hinges will reduce the swing. In this photo I've put the washer under the screw but without the MORryde hinge stop plate, this configuration reduces the opening swing slightly. Adding the washer and the MORryde stop plate will reduce it a lot. You can try both configurations.
b. If all else fails to correct the problem, follow the instructions in the Jeep TSB and replace your stay rod with a later revision that has more tolerance.
Sorry I couldn't do this analysis when you first reported the problem, I was traveling/at SEMA and didn't have my JKU with me to do the comparative photo analysis.
