Garage Projects

The Lone Ranger – Front Bumper Guessing

I started playing with some ideas for my front bumper tonight. I was having difficulty trying to figure out how to make the front bumper not seem retardedly huge. With the help of the wife, I think I’ve got a decent concept to work on.

The issue is that I’m trying to meet IL lift law, which states 27” in the front for my GVWR. The lower part of my winch plate currently meets that:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

That’s cool, but as you can see, I’ve got a huge gap to fill. So I grabbed some scrap steel and cardboard and got at it. The first attempt started to confirm my fears that I was going to wind up with a giant bumper when I just came off the lower plate and went up:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

It got even worse when I added the cardboard filler parts:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

At this point, it was time to regroup and come up with something more ‘minimalist’ if you will. Instead of starting the angle up from the bottom of the winch plate, I moved it up a bit. The added benefit of doing that is an easy/good location to mount my front hooks:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

One deviation on that theme is adding another small gusset (lower LH piece of tape) to make the lines flow a little better:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

The wife is leaning more toward not having the gusset, I’m on the fence. We’ll see what happens in the end.

The front bumper is going to be tucked up fairly well under the front fascia with only the extreme ends (by the turn signals) sticking out enough to use as exo mounting points. I think I’ll go ahead and add a small stinger when I get to it as they seem to be handy enough to have (though I hate the looks of them). The outside edges of the bumper will wrap around the side of the truck just a bit as well.

I’ve got an idea on a ‘removable’ center section where the fairlead will mount to. My hope is to have a section that I can pop out to remove the winch if needed without having to pull the whole front of the nose off the truck. We’ll see if I can make the idea in my head work out in real life.

As a whole, I’m going to stew on the idea for a bit (need to kill time while the paint dries anyway) before I commit to anything.

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