Well, that is a tough one. My gut would be to follow your heart.
The reason I say this is, if you get what you want you'll rationalize the rest of the upgrades to match.
If you don't get what you want, you won't have that inner smile every time you walk out to the Jeep.
You don't seem the type to push things, or abuse your equipment. I *think* that will buy you time to gather up all the goodies to make it rock solid.
Not trying to be an enabler (for once... lol), but tires are so expensive, and last a long time. What's that saying about the price tag is forgotten...?
That's what I'm worried about. Every time if gone smaller than I wanted for the sake of practicality, I've ended up getting the higher thing 6mos later. But I've also gone too far with mods and regretted it.
But there are way more pros in the 35s column.
One thing I hated about my 100-series was how badly it needed a regear. The mountain climb heading west out of green river, Utah had me down to 35mph. The jeep can maintain highway speed up those. Part of that is weight, but the rest is that I'm over geared right now. I don't want to lose that or have to pay to regear since I already paid for the 4.11s.
Aesthetically, I like that my jeep looks lifted with the 3.5 kit. 35s on the 2.5 look stock, as do the 37s on the 3.5 (at least how they fill the wheel wells). 35s with the 3.5 will hopefully achieve the right balance.
Also, everyone I go on trips with drives land cruisers on 33-34" ties or JKURs on 35s with 2.5" lifts. So I shouldn't have any trouble keeping up on the technical sections.
Money wise, the price difference doesn't matter to me. But every platform seems to have a tipping point where you need to start modding to keep up with your other mods. On 100s, it's going to 35s. On JKUs it seems to be 37s. You can do it, but to do it right costs a lot in upgraded gearing, steering, braking, wheels, ball joints, etc. and that's all money that can go toward buying myself a bigger house with a bigger garage. One that fits 78" tall trucks.
Thanks for everyone who's heard me out on this long winded, 2-year tire debate. At this point, anything will look better than stock sized tires.
I have a few trips coming up in the next few months. Lower Sierra traverse, Mexican JT to Moab traverse, and finding some
New routes through Baja Norte. So I'm excited to put the tire debate to bed and move on to preparing for those.
Hopefully the next post will be to show off the new rubber.
Another round of smaller mods are also in the works. Updates to come. And for those concerned I finally got the correct rear bumper bolts and mounted 2/3 of the rear bumper panels. The center and PS are bent and need to be replaced though.
