To the OP, if it were me, and the FJC was my only vehicle, i'd go with the armor.
With a SAS you are still gonna highly want to replace the front and rear bumper.
Rock rails are a must eitherway and should be very high on the mod list (first IMO)
I would go witht the SAS, I am curious what it cost to get it done? Its way above my skill level to try and do myself. I am not a fan of the IFS where I wheel just do to how short the travel is in the front. seems like the whole rig is very stiff because no flex in the front. Just my Opinion.
Its expensive. Take what you are thinking it should cost, and double or triple it. I was highly considering doing this. That is until i sat down and started crunching the numbers on the price of having someone else do it.
To have a shop do it with new parts like a d60, and do a 4link, and coilovers, with gears and a ARB locker (which if you are doing a SAS a locker up front i think would be assumed), you'd probably also want to re-gear both axles as well since the main reason to do the swap in the first place is to run much bigger tires.
new d60: close to 3000
gears: couple hundred
Air locker, compressor,: 1200
gears and air locker install labor : ~500 or so (x2 plus the price of new gears for the rear end if changing diff ratio, which you would be running bigger tires)
custom adj coilovers: at least 12-1500 if off the shelf adj coilovers are close to that.
DOM tubing for links, JJ or heim ends, : couple hundred.
scrap metal used to make mounts: price depends on shop
Labor to install all of this: This really depends on the shop. But this is going to take any shop a good little while to do. Just from seeing builds on here, minimum of about a week or so to install and fine tune everything? (though that is probably a great under estimate of time to have it fine tuned) Labor will be probably close to the same price as all the parts above.
You are looking at close to 10K+ for everything if not more, not including larger tires, which once you get up to 37" sizes cost about 350 or so a tire, so roughly 1500-1800 on tires as well.
You could do a barebones, used d44, on leaf springs, unlocked, match the gear ratio in the rear so you don't have to re-gear the rear end. You could do this for a lot less. But imo, there is no point in really doing it unless you are going to go all the way with it.
This is just my opinion on the matter, so take that with a grain of salt, SAS-ing the FJ to make it into a crawler is not a wise decision if it's your DD-er, reliability is a main concern, or you are on any kind of budget at all. You will be much, much better off buying an older toyota 4runner or pickup for cheap, with a SFA already, and wheeling the snot out of it, and keeping the FJC as a mild wheeler. If the FJC is just a wheeling toy, its been paid off and you have a few other cars you normally drive, then yeah, it might be more of an option.
Something like this you can buy for much less than the price of a SAS on the FJ.
Folks like Jon (Bellydoc) and SeanK and especially some of our vendors who have done these swaps are much more knowledgeable about this than i am and can probably give you a better cost idea, but i think what i have above is close.
