At the beginning of the May, over the course of two afternoons and evenings, my buddy Rob and I dove into the installation of the Chief Products Hidden Winch system in the front end of my WK2 Grand Cherokee Trailhawk. I had been speaking with Bill Mackin, the owner of Australia-based Chief Products, since the beginning of March in regards to getting one of their mounts test-fitted in a 2017 Grand Cherokee to see what kind of adjustments, if any, would need to be made for the new generation grills and front-ends. I reached out to Warn to inquire as to sponsorships for a winch, and after speaking with someone from their Sponsorship team, was offered a steep discount on the 10-S Platinum for installation on the Trailhawk.

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Having never taken the front end off of the Jeep before, and being used to the much more accessible front end of a Wrangler, I did some research as to what went into taking the lower fascia and the upper bumper off. Chief Products had a good write-up for the fascia, and a quick YouTube video showed how simple it was to remove the bumper… we were in business. It’s easy enough, with a few quarter-turn screws under the fascia, two plastic rivets per side in the wheel well, the fascia then pops off from the bumper. The bumper itself requires removing a small hex-head nut in each wheel well, and two small plastic rivets along the top of the radiator brace bar.

We decided to do the installation at Rob’s house, as I’m still in the process of getting my garage at home organized enough and he has a large driveway that easily accommodated our needs. I opened the shipping boxes and laid out our components on an old section of drywall he had in the shop, and we took inventory of what we had to work with.
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From there we disconnected the ACC camera via the two fasteners that hold it to the bottom of the OEM bumper. There’s a small wiring harness that needs to be unclipped, then it was placed to the side well out of harms way (I don’t want to know how much that camera costs). We then went about removing all of the fasteners that hold the OEM bumper to the Jeep itself, as highlighted by the red circles in the photo below. With the Styrofoam bar and metal backing removed, we took off the plastic protecting pieces from the air suspension system and the windshield washer fluid reservoir. Last to do here was remove the air duct pieces from in front of the radiator, and move the wiring looms as far out of the way as possible for access to the front end.

The majority of the Chief Products Hidden Winch system is comprised of 3 main pieces (comprised of 5 individual parts). The winch cradle spans the mid-section in front of the radiator, and holds the winch in place. There are two frame mount brackets, one for each side, and finally two tow-hook mounting brackets that sandwich between the cradle and frame brackets. By starting with the frame brackets, installing the mounting fasteners without tightening down, we were able to then install the tow hook pieces and the winch cradle without issue, putting the hardware in to hold the entire assembly together while we figured out how the other pieces assembled.

This was getting towards the end of our first day (night, actually… we were working by the light of the flood light in the driveway) and we were both pretty tired. We struggled for a while with the tow hooks before I called Bill at Chief Products and asked him if we were missing something. In hind sight, had we played around a bit more with the pieces we would have realized that the OEM tow hooks need to be swapped to the opposite side of their original installation location, and flipped over to work with the new brackets. Laymen’s terms: move the driver hook to the passenger side, passenger hook to the driver side, flip 180 degrees, and install to Chief Products tow hook spacers.

At that point we called it a night, put the front bumper and ACC camera back on without the lower fascia, and I drove home without incident or any pieces falling off.
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Once we were comfortable with the trimming, we moved on to the installation of the winch. The Zeon 10-S Platinum is described by Warn as being “built for those who push the limits-with double the durability, 20% faster line speed, and extreme IP68-rated waterproofing. The Advanced Wireless Remote controls not only the winch, but also the clutch and other accessories. With a 10,000 lb. pulling capacity, high-performance motor package, and Spydura® Synthetic Rope, you'll be equipped to go places others only dream about.” – for this application, it’s perfect, especially with the electrically controlled clutch. Whereas my other winch sits on the open front of my Wrangler, I don’t have access on the WK2 to engage and disengage the electric vs. free-spool setting. With the remote, this makes the hidden factor of the winch all that more feasible.

We followed Warn’s instructions for mounting the winch and spooling the Spydura line, outfitting the end of the synthetic rope with my new Factor55 Flatlink winch hook. Rated with a breaking point far beyond what I’ll ever be utilizing, the easy D-ring attachment point and red powdercoating make it a sleek addition to the front end of the Grand Cherokee. Once the line was appropriately attached we spooled it in, maintaining tension on the line by hand and wrapping it cleanly. While I don’t currently have any auxiliary lighting planned for the grille of the Trailhawk, the Zeon Platinum offers 2x 12v ports to plug auxiliary lights into, to then be controlled on/off by the wireless remote. I may someday add some lights in there, at which point this will be a phenomenal way to avoid running wiring through the firewall.

I took a couple dozen shots of the front end from every angle I could think of, and then we moved forward with re-installing the ACC camera on a Chief Products supplied bracket to the rear bolts holding the winch into the cradle. We had to wallow out the mounting bracket holes a little bit to fit what I assume is a revised camera mount dimensions, but notes and photographs were taken to show the guys at Chief.

Once the camera was good to go and re-harnessed, we re-installed the front bumper securing it back into the wheel wells and above the radiator by reversing the removal process. Putting the fascia back on we realized we had a little more trimming to do to get the outer edges by the wheels to fit appropriately. We got it to fit that night, but after driving last week with regular use, I realized I have to go back and re-trim some of the area in front of the fairlead mount to get the clips to sit properly back in the bumper above the fascia.
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Continuing with the switch panel install… 

I apologize in advance for some of the photos seeming blurry, I was shooting this outside, handheld, with a very narrow depth of field to avoid a high/grainy ISO, and had nowhere to really bounce the flash off of in these tight spaces. I know most of you won’t care, but for the photographers in us, I wanted to preface by saying I know there’s a lot of unintentional bohek/obvious DoF.

Next up came the actual dash install of the switches. This part was a bit unnerving, as removing the knee air bag panel from under the steering column required the removal of a fair bit of parts, and the FSM’s Interior Panel Removal section wasn’t really great at depicting exactly what I needed.  I took a ton of photos for you to see, but I’ll detail this a bit more.

I was home this weekend between work trips, the last two weeks in Orlando and Vegas, the next two in Northwest Arkansas and then Orlando again… This left a very narrow window to get any work done on the Jeep, but Rob and I had anticipated the winch mount and winch having arrived by then… Unfortunately, they hadn’t, so we decided to move forward with another project I had been working on.
 
One of the most important things for me in vehicles is visibility. The TJ has a LOT of LED lighting, strobes, etc. - so the plan for the WK2  was bound to be pretty intricate as well. First step for any additional lighting is figuring out how it’s going to be controlled, and from where it’s going to be controlled. After Googling a fair amount of options, seeing if anyone had built vehicle-specific panels, I went ahead with my initial plan to install a switch panel to the lower left side of the steering column. There was a great write-up by a guy on JeepForum a few years ago that followed along the same lines as my idea.
 
I wanted/needed to keep the switches refined and purposeful, so I had to decide which each of the four Contura switch spaces would control. For me, reverse light is hugely important… second to that is forward facing light, so recessed driving lights or some kind of LED bar will get a spot. Third up in my mind is a strobe light system, as I’ve spent many years with one in the TJ and often find myself pulling over to help people on the side of the road, or utilizing them for other situations in bad weather and the like. Spot 4 then became a catch-all, or an expansion slot.
 
So:
 
Switch 1: Reverse LED Lights
Switch 2: LED Bar (likely roof mounted)
Switch 3: LED Strobe System
Switch 4: For the mean time, VHF radio power.
 
With a quick Amazon order for switches, wiring, heat-shrink crimp connectors, and the 4-space mount, I got to work. The VHF switch cover was from eBay for an extra seven bucks.

​The Contura switches I bought were 5-pin versions… Inputs: +12v for the status light and power source, +12v for the locator light (to find the switch when it’s off), and a ground. Outputs: ground loop, +12v for the light itself. It took some research to find out the exact way to wire this, but once I knew I got to work on an 18awg wire loom for them all. The night I put it together I was sitting in my girlfriend’s office as she worked late and finally had to reassure her coworkers that I wasn’t building a bomb in their workplace. Final results were clean, I was happy.
 
From there I had to figure out what kind of wire loom I would use to get from the eventually-will-be-built control box (relays, fuses, flux capacitors, etc) to the switches. I knew each of the 4 switches would need an individual wire strand to trigger each respective relay, then all would need a +12v lead which they could share, and a ground which they could also share… this brings us to 6-strands of wire for those who can’t count fast.
 
I work in the live events industry; so 5 and 7 pin cable is a common thing in my life. The issue that I had was the fact that most of those wires, as well as DB9 data cable, are mainly 22-26 AWG, which although it’s okay to push ~0.33A down through, I didn’t want to mess with having to crimp 24 gauge cable to the switch pins. A quick run to Home Depot for 7-strand thermostat cable yielded me a more substantial 7-strand (solid core vs stranded) wire for sprinkler system installations. The other benefit of sprinkler versus thermostat is that the latter was brown, while sprinkler wire housing is black… cleaner to install and easier to hide.
 
Once I had the wire in hand, I cut each strand to the appropriate length. Red and White would be my hot and ground lines for easy decoding, and the color-coding of the rest would be easy enough to remember for when it’s time to install the control box. In order of (ROYGBIV) I continued past red with Orange on switch 1, Yellow on 2, Green on 3, and Blue on 4. I cut each of the wires to specific lengths to make the sprinkler loom sit cleanly against the switch panel, and then went ahead and crimped/heat shrunk the wires to mate with their female crimp-on ends. I added a separate +12v line made of a miscellaneous five foot section of 14awg wire to tie into an ignition-based +12v line to turn on the locator/indicator LEDs in the bottom of the Contura switches, separate of the ignition.
 
In laymen’s terms, I wanted the indicator lights to come on with the ignition of the vehicle, but the lights themselves (strobes/rev/LED) to be able to remain on even when the vehicle is turned off. The latter will get their +12v lead from a fuse panel directly tied to the battery.
 
The result was a rather clean switch panel, parallel grounds and +12v for the leads and switch LEDs, and a 15-foot wire-loom for the relays to be triggered by. 

Photos of other owners who have tailgate mounted antennas on the WK2 have shown them in two locations, 1 being drilled into the brake light assembly, and the other into the lower bumper below the brake light. In both instances the antenna is mounted into plastic, so I went ahead and ordered a NGP (no ground plane) antenna from Firestik. This is a special kind of antenna where the internal wiring is designed to work at locations that do not have metal ground planes, like motorhome fiberglass, on a motorcycle where the metal is minimal, and on boats. In this instance it worked perfectly for my plastic brake light.

I initially was hesitating to drill into the brake light itself but after removing the plastic pop rivets and taking the light off the Jeep, I realized that there was plenty of room to get a metal bracket on the back side of the mount in between the tail light's plastic. I cut up a small piece (1.5" x 1.5" , if that) of 18 gauge steel to provide a firm backing to the antenna bracket. Drilling it out to the same hole pattern as the bracket I was then able to use the self-tapping screws to get through the mount, plastic brake light, and metal on the other side. I painted the metal plate and put it front of my heat gun to speed up the drying. Putting this back onto the Jeep I was able to close the tail gate and check that there were no clearance issues between the two when it closed. Initially there was a little bit of rubbing (against the tail gate side plastic, not metal thankfully!) so I took the bracket to my angle grinder with a flapper disc and smoothed it down a bit to cut down on rubbing.
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Next up in the process was figuring out how to get the coax cable back to the CB itself. I had decided from the beginning that the CB controller box would live under the battery compartment lid (the battery on the WK2 is under the passenger seat... makes 12v wiring a breeze), so the coax needed to end up there. I fed the wire through the vents in the back of the trunk, then used my interior trim tool kit to lightly bend the trim pieces and push the wiring underneath. I moved from the rear pillar to the trim piece at the very back of the trunk, then around to the passenger side. I had to unbolt the cargo tie down to lift the right side of that trim piece up, but then was able to feed the wire down along the spare tire compartment to behind the rear bench seats. Moving to the rear passenger door, I fed the coax under the door trim and then under the passenger seat bracket and into the battery compartment. It took a while to get all of this done, using patience as I was petrified of breaking a trim panel on the brand new truck, but I managed to use all 18' of the wire without any coils or major stuffing of any spare wire... all good things for signal! It's also nice that the only time the cable is exposed is the 2" between the B-pillar and the front passenger seat, and the location where it passes through the tailgate weather strip.

Once that was done, I went to check in on my buddy Rob who had been going to town with the battery compartment cover. Cobra includes a nice grommet and mount for the wire, so we decided that instead of mounting the control box on the top of the compartment cover, we'd mount it underneath. Due to where the battery lives there was a lot of room to the left side, where the control box fit perfectly. Simple crimp-on ends were easily attached to the (+) lead of the battery, and we grounded it out to the seat bracket for a good chassis ground. Drilling out the compartment cover to run the mic control cable under the seat, we then threw the grommet in there and called it good. The nice thing about this CB is that the microphone can detach from the control box so if I ever need to get it out of the way for whatever reason, it's simple to do so.

Here are the photos of the wiring (I labeled the route in red) and the under-seat bracket and wiring.
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