Working inside sales at GenRight Off Road gives longtime off-roader Dave Watts an advantage over most of us. He has easy access to some of the best Jeep parts available plus colleagues and friends who 'wheel almost every day, giving Dave the opportunity to use his TJ often.

Maybe you don’t know Tom Wood personally, but you know his products. As the owner of Tom Wood’s Custom Driveshafts, he has an international reputation for building quality driveshafts and drivetrain parts. When he’s not building driveshafts, Tom likes to take one of his Jeeps, such as his 1979 CJ7, into the backcountry.

We really like the two-door Jeep Wrangler JK. With its size and minimal entry points, it is as close as you can get to a brand-new, traditionally styled Jeep. The Wrangler Unlimited is no slouch, of course. It’s just too darn big sometimes to fit the notches and trails that our TJ liked so much—the same ones that our YJ liked before that and our CJ before that. The true JK, the two-door version, still fits in just like all of the models before it did. With so many four-door JKs on the trail, it’s often a rare sight to see a two-door. That’s why we jumped at the opportunity to take a closer look at Mike Glaubach’s 2008 model.

We saw the JK and it looked good. That’s how we first ran across Road Race Motorsports and its 2013 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon. But what the heck was a shop that specialized in building sport compact and rally race cars and designing bolt-on upgrade parts for the same doing building a Jeep? After speaking with owner Rob Tallini and Johnny Rocha, director of 4x4 operations at Road Race Motorsports, we got our answer. The market was there and so was the crossover of its research and development. They built race cars that found the podium almost every time they spun the track, so why not apply all that knowledge to the ever-growing 4x4 market, particularly the JK?

Beep, Beep. Ever since 1948, when Chuck Jones created the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote for Warner Brothers, the familiar sound of the Road Runner has been heard coming from televisions, movies, and … Plymouth Road Runners. When Mark Turner, CEO of Daystar, started to build his '11 JK Wrangler, he knew it was going to be fast and live in the desert. What better name to hang on it than Road Runner?

My family went on vacation to Scottsdale, Arizona, and ran into Brent Graef, one of the managers at the Fairmont Scottsdale Resort. Even though it was vacation time and I only had a point-and-shoot camera, I had to take a ride with Brent into the desert to check out his 2008 JK Unlimited Rubicon.

It was a cool summer morning in the foothill town of Georgetown, California. From the wood-rail balcony of the Georgetown Hotel, guests sipped coffee and took in the spectacle below. On the two-lane country street, a few dozen Willys Jeeps lined up five abreast, wheels pointed "upcountry," toward the High Sierra. Opposite the hotel, members of the Rotary Club and the Georgetown Rifle and Gun Club prepared breakfast for the gathering crowd and handed out bag lunches of fried chicken. There was an excitement in the air, anticipation of a weekend of camping and Jeeping in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Steve Nantz is the owner of Moab 4x4 Outpost (M4O) in Moab, Utah. His personal Jeep, Brownie, is a Moab veteran. In fact, I used to drive Brownie when it was a rental Jeep a quarter of a century ago. I recount some of my own Brownie adventures in this month’s 4WORD.

Ample wheel travel paired with Fox 2.0 Performance Series shocks, not to mention the liquid-cooled 839cc V-twin engine, make the RSX850i an incredible vehicle for any terrain. There are three RSX models available: the Gator RSX850i Sport, the RSX850i Trail, and the Base RSX.

We've seen a lot of cool Toy trucks. Many are cookie-cutter rigs. They work well and get you down the trail. However, every once in a while we run across a clean build with some unique style built in. Witness here the '82 Toyota truck owned by Tanner Lamb.

It wasn't just the purple paint that drew us to Rebecca Campbell's "Purple Panther" 1986 Bronco II. It was the aplomb with which it tackled terrain. Spotted at the 2011 Cal 4Wheel Hi Desert Roundup, we watched as the BII worked its way up detritus-strewn slopes and through tight turns.

Nate Williams is famous throughout the intermountain west for his fabricating skills. He built this 1979 CJ7 from the ground up in his home's two-car garage.

We’ve got 16 rigs to showcase, and only so many pages to do it in. Most of the time, multiple photos and more info about each rig are the best way to do justice to a build, but that means we can’t show as many rigs. In the interest of being more inclusive this time, we’re going with one photo of each rig, and using only the most salient statistics. Less is more.

Savvy Off-Road owner Gerald Lee knows a thing or two about ’wheeling. He’s tackled the best of Southern California’s trails in his 2005 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited and even served as co-driver/navigator/spotter, with John Currie behind the wheel, at the inaugural Smittybilt Every Man Challenge at the 2012 King of the Hammers event. The duo piloted a Jeep Wrangler to an overall win in the stock class.

Eric Miller lives in Hurricane, Utah, the center of southwestern Utah’s off-roading paradise. His 1987 Suzuki Samurai, “Skull and Bones,” was built so Eric could get into the backcountry and have fun with his family. Actually, the Sammy has gone through five separate builds, starting as a stripped-to-the-bone body and frame. That’s where the name Skull and Bones came from, and it’s stuck.

By the time you read this, there will be no more new Chevrolet Colorado/GMC Canyon (355 V-8 platform) trucks being built. GM is closing the Shreveport, Louisiana, plant and we won’t see another Colorado until the completely redesigned 2014, badged as a 2015 model. The new trucks won’t have a V-8. Because of this, many enthusiasts purchased one before they couldn’t anymore.

Moab, Utah — with its picturesque landscape and extensive trail systems — attracts outdoor adventurers from around the world. Each spring thousands make the annual pilgrimage to the Easter Jeep Safari, bringing in a stellar collection of modified Jeeps and killer customs.

Some years back Aaron and Natalie Pennell acquired the 2001 Nissan Frontier truck you see here, but it didn't look much like it does now with the exception of the factory silver paint. The truck had been 'wheeled quite a bit and pushed beyond the limits of the stock Nissan drivetrain. They soon realized they wanted to build the truck into something more that could get them across tougher trails in the Southwest.

Del and Stacie Albright, full-time career professional land-use-and-access advocates, work as Team Albright, where freedom rules and land access is job No. 1.

www.JK-Adventure.com's latest build, Havoc, is a unique JK built from the point of view that you can have a rough and tough JK able to run hardcore trails without breaking the bank, or the Jeep. If needed, this build could be accomplished over time as your budget allowed. So many of us buy a JK and lift it for the looks and then start 'wheeling it and get really into the hobby, and at some point are looking to take it to the next level.

A few months ago, we ran a feature on making over a 1989 YJ in which a few things were repaired and new seats, bumpers, winch, sport cage, and softtop were installed. The owner, Chad Hughes, finished the Jeep and made it a fine ’wheeler.

Most Jeep Cherokee owners scoff at the hype over the JK four-door. After all, the XJ’s were four-door Jeeps long before the JK was conceived on the drawing board. But with many JK owners upgrading their axles, gears, and other components with aftermarket parts, guys like Chris Faustmann, in charge of research and development at Performance Automotive Group, saw this surge of JK popularity as a unique opportunity for his personal XJ Jeep.

It's no secret that JK Wranglers are underpowered. Even the 2012s, while better than earlier JKs, aren't great. Wranglers scream for V-8 power and torque, and the aftermarket answered with Chrysler Hemi swaps, as the Hemi mills and transmissions worked with the JK's CANbus. The HEMIs worked well, but those who liked GM power weren't invited to the party.

Hardcore builds are fun, but sometimes there's no need to use dynamite to swat a fly. Poison Spyder's latest JK shares the hardcore heritage of other Spyder builds, but does so in a package that calls on ready-made products from Poison Spyder and other industry luminaries.

We've been driving and photographing some exceptional vehicles lately. One of the best is Tony Pellegrino's GenRight JK Unlimited Rubicon. While driving to the photo shoot area, the JK exhibited no front/rear sideways squirm as its double triangulated long arm suspension system eliminates both track bars. While coil sprung, track bar-equipped Jeep owners are used to the squirm and seldom think about it, driving a Jeep that doesn't do it is amazing!