Well after about 3 weeks of after work and weekends the bumper is done. When I first thought about doing this I thought "how hard can it be?" How naive....I now know why these things cost so much.....with me doing all the shiat work and my buddy doing all the welding and designing it probably took us a total of 25-30 hours.
In the end I paid $150 for the steel. $60 for the various coatings (2 coats rust proof primer and 4 coats Duplicolour bedliner). And about $40 in various other crap. So total I spent about $250 on this thing.
I am extremely impressed with it. As far as I am concerned, not only does it look great but it was PROVEN yesterday on a run I did with forum members from here. Winch was put to the test as was the skid plate and even the front of the bumper got acquainted with a large rock. Everything held up great. With the winch I was pulling a lifted TJ uphill and the bumper didnt even flinch. Not bad considering the design doesnt have the winch really sitting on anything but the bumper itself.

Some may recognize what design I based this off of....the Smittybilt. I prefer mine though because the winch is hidden a bit better. I did however run into a problem with wanting to mount the stock foglights...oh well the Hellas fixed that.

Anyway here she is. Tell me what you guys think....I know there are at least 7 forum members from here that saw it in action yesterday and were asking where to get theirs done..

The plate location is temporary until I relocate it in front of the solenoid box.




Here she is before coating and tubes...I was pretty close to leaving it a stubby and it is STILL an option..I just think the tubing finishes it off nicely.



And lastly, to show you guys some of the work involved:
notice on the left the holes are round? Well I wanted to use carriage bolts. Those shackle plates are 1/2 " steel. notice how the holes on the right are square? notice the square file? Ya...that sucked doing by hand....1 hour per plate.
You can see in the pic where we tried to weld an air hammer adapter to it to help out...didnt work though



So there it is...is it absolutely perfect? No...there are flaws, but no one noticed them yesterday until I pointed them out.
I am biased but IMHO it is one of the nicest bumpers I have seen.
Hopefully once some of the members that were on the run yesterday post some pics I will have better ones to show off....also if anyone has ANY questions about specific stuff...dont hesitate to PM me....

thanks
TH

 

Looks nice. I like it. How do you like the Superwinch LP8500?

Ty

 

Well for the one time I used it yesterday she did well...
The remote came DOA though...it doesnt pay out with the switch (not that you do that a lot, but..)..some quick troubleshooting told me the actual switch itself was fooked....exchanging it next week....

 

Looks good!

 

nice that you built it yourself.

 

nice work looks great!

 

Looks good!

I'm a big fan of building your own stuff. I built most of mine.

 

Looks great. Welcome to the 'custom bumper brotherhood'.

I built a front and rear bumper for my TJ a few years ago...a ton of work and time but I enjoyed the project. Every time I look at my TJ I think, 'yeah, I did that'!.

Would I do it again? Yep, the wife has a JK that will get some custom bumpers someday.

Mikey

BTW, if you've got pics showing details and progress of the project, you may want to do a write-up over in the write-up section.

 

Thanks for the comments guys.....I do have some pics but not a lot of the whole process. It would be kind of hard to do a write up as it was a lot of measuring....plasma cutting welding then grinding....we really didnt use many "hard and fast set measurements" per se...except for the main square part...the tubes were a lot of trial and error. And the winch box part we had to engineer something totally different using the crossmember with support brackets, along with gussets under it and a section of angle iron. The thing is rock solid.
It was a BEAR to put on though....getting to a couple of the carriage bolts to put the nuts on was crazy...
If i was to do it again (and I wont be) I would try to think of another way to mount it to the frame...

 

Well I just took her for a wash....where I hit the rock yesterday took the bed liner right off....didnt chip though it just rubbed it right off....but didnt take the primer...so all it will need is a quick spray with more bedliner....