Jeep Gladiator/Wrangler Dash Mount Prototyping

Our Jeep Gladiator/Wrangler (JT/JL) Dash Mount is almost here! The prototyping phase has gone very smoothly and we’ll be releasing our Jeep Dash Mount Kit for PRE-ORDER on BuiltRight Day, January 1st 2024. We've been tossing around the JT/JL dash mount concept for a little over 2 years now, not due to any particular design roadblocks but simply a lack of bandwidth and other products and fitments with higher demand taking priority. Of course in that time other truck storage manufacturers who have previously borrowed our design cues and created shockingly similar dash mounts to ours jumped ahead and made a solution for the Jeep JT/JL. Without necessarily meaning to, we waited to come up with the best solution, not the fastest solution.

Due to the narrow and shallow nature of the Jeep Gladiator/Wrangler dash tray, we knew that designing this mount like our older dash mounts would mean needing to use lighter weight steel because of the tight bends, thus the lower mounting bracket would be much less sturdy and flush fitting. This is the case with current Jeep JT/JL dash mounts available on the market. Our decision to take design cues from our newer dash mounts, like the Ford Bronco Dash Mount Standard/Pro, will make for a much better solution. The glass fiber-reinforced composite mounting block system with a metal top plate spanning the two blocks allows for maximum mounting locations and perfect fitment inside of the Jeep dash tray, leaving no room for error in the installation - no ‘close-ish’ alignment or weird angles!

We started where we always do when it comes to product development, 3D scanning to get an exact shape and double checking essential features with a caliper to get precise measurements, then beginning to experiment with solutions in CAD. Matt drafted up the bottom shape of the composite mounting blocks, making sure they sit perfectly flush in the 3D model on the computer. He loaded the design on one of our Prusa machines and 3D printed the mounting block shape for a preliminary test fit. Even though it was a first design, the printed part fit almost perfectly in the dash, so Matt immediately refined the design to interface with the steel top plate where devices/phone holders will be mounted. The three piece dash mount concept allows for a perfect, flush fit and makes reconfiguration simple whenever your setup or desired device layout changes. 

In our next video/blog post we test fit the final prototype mounting blocks with the steel top plate and it works flawlessly! The dash mount is already in the production stage and ready for our January 1st 'BuiltRight Day' PRE-ORDER. Please let us know if you enjoy reading and watching product development content like this, it’s a huge part of what we do here at BuiltRight and absolutely essential to how we operate - we enjoy sharing this process with you as we grow and it becomes more streamlined! Check out other BuiltRight Jeep Products here, and watch the first half of us prototyping this dash mount below: