Quote:
Originally Posted by P_nlsn
Coastal Offroad Front Bumper
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I'm super proud of how the bumper turned out. It was a ton of work, and it's definitely not perfect, but it sure does look good!
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The Build:
The bumper has a pretty straight forward assembly, and the instructions contain diagrams that really help. Since the website only offers up to a 2" body lift, I emailed Brandon and talked with him about making my kit with a 3" body lift correction. He was super helpful and said it would be no problem at all.
This is what I started with:
And this is what I finished with:
This was my first welding project ever, and it surprisingly wasn't terrible. I did a bit of practice with some scrap metal beforehand, and I had some help from my brother and dad who have welded before, but I also did a bunch of it on my own too.
In hindsight, I went too crazy on the grinder, and not crazy enough on the welder. There were a few spots I had to reweld because I took too much off with the flap disk and you could see the crack of the joint - not to mention the playdoh marks all over the thing too. Also, I got impatient and ground the outside welds before welding the inside - HUGE rookie mistake right there, it led to a lot of heat warping and joint cracks on the outside. Overall though, it still looks great. Once it was powder coated and I got it muddy, the thing looked b-e-a-utiful
However, as easy as the bumper was - we weren't prepared for the amount of work it would be to get the hoops on. We knew it would be difficult, but just underestimated how difficult. It took a few days of work, 1 extra tube, a tube notcher, more cuts than I can count, and even more grinding to get the tubes where they needed to be
The first tube we cut with a saw was too short, so we had to email Brandon again to order a new one. He was super helpful once again and had no problem at all shipping us one replacement tube (we also went ahead and bought their skid plate kit though to make the price of shipping the tube from Canada worth it). We also bought a tube notcher from good ol' Harbor Freight to help in the tube nothing proccess. Part of our struggle was being inexperienced - we had never actually notched tubing before - but there's also just so many angles that have to be taken into account so it fits right
The best way we found to cut the hoops with our gear and experience - was to cut them long and just grind the crap out of them. We notched it to be sorta close, but still a little long, then held it on the bumper to see what touched, ground that part back some, held it back up there and repeated. It was really tedious work, but it worked and resulted in some pretty nice fitting notches
If you're reading this for tips on doing your own bumper, I recommend LOTS of practice welding tubes if you want them to look good. I practiced a little before doing mine, but tube welds are hard to make look good. Mine are good enough to hold it together and be strong, but you just can't look too close cause they're kinda ugly
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Powdercoating:
I see a lot of people saying "don't powder coat your bumpers if you plan to actually use them" - but I disagree. A proper powder coat is highly durable. Unless you plan to rake the bumper on every rock you see while doing some extreme rock climbing, the powder coat should hold up just fine. From personal experience - my brother and I combined having three powdercoated bumpers - and each bumper getting put to use (just not as rock crawlers) - they are just fine and powdercoat holds up. If you somehow happen to get a chip, it can easily be fixed with black nail polish - yes, that's right, nail polish - works great, can be applied with high accuracy, and matches that gloss look of a flat black powder coat enough to be unnoticeable
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Blinkers/DRL's:
The blinkers can just be wired directly into the stock wiring:
The blinkers/DRL's required some modification to install though. I'm just using the ones recommended by Coastal for now. Because they are LED's, but the stock relay is for the current of an incandescent, they result in a hyperflash. Unfortunately, the best "official" fix for that is buying a new relay designed for LED's - but there isn't one designed specifically for my truck, so we had to go the DIY route. To fix the hyperflash, you can grind the resistor in the relay down to require less current - so that's what we did:
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Offroad Lights:
I went with 4 RoughCountry 2" flood pods that run at 18w per pod (so 72w total). Here's a link to those:
2-inch Square Cree LED Lights (Black Series) | Rough Country
I decided to wire those into the factory fog light circuit so I wouldn't have to run a bunch of wires through the firewall and stuff. This was easy enough, I just cut the end of the wiring harness off and spliced it into the fog light wiring. Since I'm running 4 lights, each fog light circuit is running 2 lights - I haven't run into any problems with fuses or anything so far, so this is fine:
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Winch:
I got a 10,000lb Gen2 X20 winch with steel cable from Smittybuilt. Here's a link to it:
Smittybilt X2O 10K Waterproof 10000lb Wireless Winch Gen2 - 97510
Unfortunately, the holes precut in the bumper for the winch and fairlead were too small for the hardware provided with the winch, and we didn't find that out until after we got it back from the powdercoat shop, so we had to drill them out some more. After that though, everything bolted up just fine
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Shackles:
Because of the thickness of the bumper where the shackles mount, typical isolators aren't thick enough to actually isolate anything, so I purchased some isolators similar to these, and they are just the right thickness to hold the shackles steady:
Amazon.com: Red Hound Auto D-Ring Shackle Isolator Compatible with Jeep Towing Off Road Kit 3/4 Inches Silencer Clevis 4pc Set: Automotive