Post-installation novella: HNC Duty Bumper w/Smittybilt 12k Winch
10-08-2017, 12:30 AM
#1
Senior Member
Thread Starter
Post-installation novella: HNC Duty Bumper w/Smittybilt 12k Winch
Post-installation review: Hard Notched Customs "Duty" Bumper on 2017 F-150 3.5 EcoBoost, with SmittyBilt 12k winch
I had three key criteria in looking for bumpers:
- winch-compatible
- as light as reasonably possible
- allows retention of the crash bars
Aesthetics were also involved, but not as a primary driver. Keep scrolling for lots of text and photos describing the installation, but the TL;DR version is:
a. I really like the HNC bumper, which came in around 160 pounds with the prerunner bars and brackets included; adding 67 pounds of winch puts me at about +182 lbs compared to stock (stock bumper is about 45 pounds)
b. I think there probably is enough airflow to the intercooler, even with a big winch in place
c. The only required modification to the vehicle was trimming away all of the soft air-routing plastic and some of the hard plastic in front of the intercooler; depending on your choices, you may also need to do some modification to mount the winch's control unit.
d. HNC was great to deal with and quickly remedied the one issue I ran into during installation (Grade 5 hardware where Grade 8 would have been more appropriate; they will make the adjustment on all future orders for this application)
e. Lining up a bumper is a PITA, having mechanical aids to hold it in place is a huge help
f. There are some bolts and nuts that are hard to reach during the installation process
g. To mount this winch on this truck, you will probably need longer leads for the control box, and you need to aggressively trim and then smooth plastic on the intercooler airflow ducting forward of the shutters.
h. Installation may be easier if you were to supply your own Class 12.9 bolts rather than reusing the factory ones, as you could flip the direction on the upper bolts
The details
The desire to not hang over my body weight in bumper weight off the nose of the truck was a huge limiting factor. I was about to cheap out and go with the Go Rhino BR5 until I Found out that it weighs in over 200 pounds (before adding a winch); further research led me towards LOD, but their bumper requires crash-bar removal, and otherwise the only low-weight bumper was the aluminum Buckstop HD Classic, at 135 pounds...and well north of $2k, with very function-over-form aesthics (it would look right at home on a SWAT vehicle).
Anyhow, I ended up getting in touch with HNC and was told that their bumper shells weigh in at about 140 lbs., and that they were fairly sure that the crash bars didn't need to come off (but not 100%, as the ones they'd installed in the shop all went on trucks with crash bars removed). Despite ending up with a relatively high price tag (and getting hit at the end with a shipping charge that most online merchants now build in), I pulled the trigger and bought a spot in their build queue.
As an Amazon Prime subscriber, waiting weeks for a purchase that ran nearly $2k harkens back to olden times before constant, instant gratification. Fortunately, I was out of town for most of that. From order to shipment ended up at five weeks, which is about what I expected from a build-to-order shop (and, in fairness, I didn't even ask when I ordered).
My initial impression of the bumper was that it was well-built and bloody heavy. I did have them add prerunner-style hoops, which increased weight a smidge, as I suspect the light buckets did. According to my bathroom scale, the whole bumper weighs in at 160 pounds (including brackets and hardware), without the winch. For comparison, the stock bumper comes in right around 45 pounds (I may have missed a piece of plastic or two in that weighing, but I doubt that would make a difference). I had selected the two-square-light-per-side option, so the bumper came with four square LED fogs and some mounting hardware. No instructions were included, but it's not particularly hard to figure out that the brackets that match the factory mount points attach to the factory mountpoints.
Speaking of comparing the OEM bumper to the HNC bumper, the OEM bumper intercooler opening is about 18.5"x5", or 92.5 sq. in. Of that, approximately 48 sq. in. is blocked by the front license plate (possibly more like 60 sq. in. depending on how high the bracket is in the opening), leaving 44.5 sq. in. The top cutouts in the HNC bumper provide 33.75 sq. in. of opening. That may still be a significant difference (small area but about 25%), but that's before considering the two 4"x5" winch-access openings, totallying another 40 sq. in. of airflow opportunity before you install a winch. With the SmittyBilt 12k winch, one of those openings is almost entirely blocked, and the other is partially obstructed...but I'm still reasonably comfortable with the total airflow opportunity. That's obviously ignoring a lot of potentially-important details about fluid dynamics, but the redneck engineering factor suggests it might just be okay.
Installation was reasonably straightfoward; if I hadn't been dealing with the winch, I suspect it would have been quite straightforward with a small PITA factor to reach some of the nuts and bolts. I will say that it helped immensely to have well-qualified help; my roommate, Josef, is also a car/truck guy and was instrumental in getting everything together. I removed the OEM bumper and tow hooks, putting aside the three large nuts holding the OEM bumper assembly to the truck. Removal also required disconnecting a layer of soft material near the top of the bumper, unplugging fog lights, and removing the most-forward wire-routing attachment points for the fog lights and the block heater. I also removed the rear-facing, tabbed bolts from the bumper to reuse.
To make room for the winch, I did remove the air-routing plastic from in front of the intercooler. I left the top to maintain separation from the radiator airflow, but cut off most of the soft plastic on the sides and bottom. Doing so was necessary to fit the winch; even without the winch, some trimming may have been necessary to avoid interfering with the bumper. I later realized that I wasn't nearly aggressive enough in my trimming, nor had I done a sufficient job of smoothing up the surface after trimming. I highly recommend doing this before mounting the bumper, as it's much easier then.
NOT ENOUGH TRIMMING. Take more plastic off the bottom of the shutter ducting at this point, don't want until after mounting the bumper. Trust me.
We mounted the bumper once to get the side-to-side alignment right where the provided brackets meet the factory mount points. After getting the lateral alignment correct, we removed the bumper and left the brackets in place by removing the eight bolts connecting the bumper to the HNC brackets. We did not attempt to tighten the upper, outboard nut on each side beyond finger-tight, as getting a tool on it and applying torque seemed to be nearly impossible (this is also why we didn't try to mount the bumper as an assembled unit--no way to tighten most of those nuts sufficiently). Reaching up and in towards said nut was made very challenging by both the lower boxing-in of the HNC bracket and the proximity of the inboard light bucket. More of that later.
(you can see the four slots for the bumper-to-bracket attachment there, as well as the Ford hardware I reused; reaching the upper-outboard nut is almost impossible with the bumper in place, and there's definitely no room to swing a ratchet, let apply leverage to one, so we installed the brackets first and then the bumper to the brackets; it may be possible to install as a unit if you supplied your own Class 12.9 hardware in place of the Ford studs and turned it from the back).
Speaking of that attachment, the provided hardware was Grade 5 (3/8"-18, if I recall correctly). I did the math on the potential load given that the bolts are perpendicular to the pulling force of the winch and concluded that four grade-five bolts per side weren't going to do it and emailed HNC; they responded later in the same day, noting that as many of their other applications have six or more bolts per side, grade-five bolts were generally sufficient...but not so much on the F-150. Joel offered to ship me higher-grade hardware or reimburse me for buying it locally if I didn't want to wait, so I went to the hardware store. I went to metric because, well, English units are dumb and, more importantly, my toolset is mostly metric. I went with class 10.9 M10 bolts and nuts, buying all seven of the appropriate length available at my local hardware store plus one that was on the short side. I was advised that all future HNC shipments for this application will include Grade 8 hardware, which has a comparable shear rating to metric class 10.9 and should solve the problem (if you're winching hard enough to shear eight Grade-8 bolts, I'd expect you're also applying forces the truck was not engineered to handled elsewhere on the chassis).
(...continued next post)
I had three key criteria in looking for bumpers:
- winch-compatible
- as light as reasonably possible
- allows retention of the crash bars
Aesthetics were also involved, but not as a primary driver. Keep scrolling for lots of text and photos describing the installation, but the TL;DR version is:
a. I really like the HNC bumper, which came in around 160 pounds with the prerunner bars and brackets included; adding 67 pounds of winch puts me at about +182 lbs compared to stock (stock bumper is about 45 pounds)
b. I think there probably is enough airflow to the intercooler, even with a big winch in place
c. The only required modification to the vehicle was trimming away all of the soft air-routing plastic and some of the hard plastic in front of the intercooler; depending on your choices, you may also need to do some modification to mount the winch's control unit.
d. HNC was great to deal with and quickly remedied the one issue I ran into during installation (Grade 5 hardware where Grade 8 would have been more appropriate; they will make the adjustment on all future orders for this application)
e. Lining up a bumper is a PITA, having mechanical aids to hold it in place is a huge help
f. There are some bolts and nuts that are hard to reach during the installation process
g. To mount this winch on this truck, you will probably need longer leads for the control box, and you need to aggressively trim and then smooth plastic on the intercooler airflow ducting forward of the shutters.
h. Installation may be easier if you were to supply your own Class 12.9 bolts rather than reusing the factory ones, as you could flip the direction on the upper bolts
The details
The desire to not hang over my body weight in bumper weight off the nose of the truck was a huge limiting factor. I was about to cheap out and go with the Go Rhino BR5 until I Found out that it weighs in over 200 pounds (before adding a winch); further research led me towards LOD, but their bumper requires crash-bar removal, and otherwise the only low-weight bumper was the aluminum Buckstop HD Classic, at 135 pounds...and well north of $2k, with very function-over-form aesthics (it would look right at home on a SWAT vehicle).
Anyhow, I ended up getting in touch with HNC and was told that their bumper shells weigh in at about 140 lbs., and that they were fairly sure that the crash bars didn't need to come off (but not 100%, as the ones they'd installed in the shop all went on trucks with crash bars removed). Despite ending up with a relatively high price tag (and getting hit at the end with a shipping charge that most online merchants now build in), I pulled the trigger and bought a spot in their build queue.
As an Amazon Prime subscriber, waiting weeks for a purchase that ran nearly $2k harkens back to olden times before constant, instant gratification. Fortunately, I was out of town for most of that. From order to shipment ended up at five weeks, which is about what I expected from a build-to-order shop (and, in fairness, I didn't even ask when I ordered).
My initial impression of the bumper was that it was well-built and bloody heavy. I did have them add prerunner-style hoops, which increased weight a smidge, as I suspect the light buckets did. According to my bathroom scale, the whole bumper weighs in at 160 pounds (including brackets and hardware), without the winch. For comparison, the stock bumper comes in right around 45 pounds (I may have missed a piece of plastic or two in that weighing, but I doubt that would make a difference). I had selected the two-square-light-per-side option, so the bumper came with four square LED fogs and some mounting hardware. No instructions were included, but it's not particularly hard to figure out that the brackets that match the factory mount points attach to the factory mountpoints.
Speaking of comparing the OEM bumper to the HNC bumper, the OEM bumper intercooler opening is about 18.5"x5", or 92.5 sq. in. Of that, approximately 48 sq. in. is blocked by the front license plate (possibly more like 60 sq. in. depending on how high the bracket is in the opening), leaving 44.5 sq. in. The top cutouts in the HNC bumper provide 33.75 sq. in. of opening. That may still be a significant difference (small area but about 25%), but that's before considering the two 4"x5" winch-access openings, totallying another 40 sq. in. of airflow opportunity before you install a winch. With the SmittyBilt 12k winch, one of those openings is almost entirely blocked, and the other is partially obstructed...but I'm still reasonably comfortable with the total airflow opportunity. That's obviously ignoring a lot of potentially-important details about fluid dynamics, but the redneck engineering factor suggests it might just be okay.
Installation was reasonably straightfoward; if I hadn't been dealing with the winch, I suspect it would have been quite straightforward with a small PITA factor to reach some of the nuts and bolts. I will say that it helped immensely to have well-qualified help; my roommate, Josef, is also a car/truck guy and was instrumental in getting everything together. I removed the OEM bumper and tow hooks, putting aside the three large nuts holding the OEM bumper assembly to the truck. Removal also required disconnecting a layer of soft material near the top of the bumper, unplugging fog lights, and removing the most-forward wire-routing attachment points for the fog lights and the block heater. I also removed the rear-facing, tabbed bolts from the bumper to reuse.
To make room for the winch, I did remove the air-routing plastic from in front of the intercooler. I left the top to maintain separation from the radiator airflow, but cut off most of the soft plastic on the sides and bottom. Doing so was necessary to fit the winch; even without the winch, some trimming may have been necessary to avoid interfering with the bumper. I later realized that I wasn't nearly aggressive enough in my trimming, nor had I done a sufficient job of smoothing up the surface after trimming. I highly recommend doing this before mounting the bumper, as it's much easier then.
NOT ENOUGH TRIMMING. Take more plastic off the bottom of the shutter ducting at this point, don't want until after mounting the bumper. Trust me.
We mounted the bumper once to get the side-to-side alignment right where the provided brackets meet the factory mount points. After getting the lateral alignment correct, we removed the bumper and left the brackets in place by removing the eight bolts connecting the bumper to the HNC brackets. We did not attempt to tighten the upper, outboard nut on each side beyond finger-tight, as getting a tool on it and applying torque seemed to be nearly impossible (this is also why we didn't try to mount the bumper as an assembled unit--no way to tighten most of those nuts sufficiently). Reaching up and in towards said nut was made very challenging by both the lower boxing-in of the HNC bracket and the proximity of the inboard light bucket. More of that later.
(you can see the four slots for the bumper-to-bracket attachment there, as well as the Ford hardware I reused; reaching the upper-outboard nut is almost impossible with the bumper in place, and there's definitely no room to swing a ratchet, let apply leverage to one, so we installed the brackets first and then the bumper to the brackets; it may be possible to install as a unit if you supplied your own Class 12.9 hardware in place of the Ford studs and turned it from the back).
Speaking of that attachment, the provided hardware was Grade 5 (3/8"-18, if I recall correctly). I did the math on the potential load given that the bolts are perpendicular to the pulling force of the winch and concluded that four grade-five bolts per side weren't going to do it and emailed HNC; they responded later in the same day, noting that as many of their other applications have six or more bolts per side, grade-five bolts were generally sufficient...but not so much on the F-150. Joel offered to ship me higher-grade hardware or reimburse me for buying it locally if I didn't want to wait, so I went to the hardware store. I went to metric because, well, English units are dumb and, more importantly, my toolset is mostly metric. I went with class 10.9 M10 bolts and nuts, buying all seven of the appropriate length available at my local hardware store plus one that was on the short side. I was advised that all future HNC shipments for this application will include Grade 8 hardware, which has a comparable shear rating to metric class 10.9 and should solve the problem (if you're winching hard enough to shear eight Grade-8 bolts, I'd expect you're also applying forces the truck was not engineered to handled elsewhere on the chassis).
(...continued next post)
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TX Iron (12-19-2017)
10-08-2017, 12:30 AM
#2
Senior Member
Thread Starter
With the main points of bumper attachment settled, the next question was the winch. I installed it in the bumper, without the control unit attached, to check fitment. As it turns out, I definitely needed to remove each bit of plastic I did, and there was very little chance of getting the control unit in the winch cavity; we also needed to clock the clutch end of the winch, I believe, to get the clutch-release lever where it would fit (and be accesible). If we had been willing to further impede airflow, it may have been possible, but given the already-noted fluid dynamics question, it seemed best not to. This was also the point at which we attached the synethic rope to the drum, which could be challenging to accomplish with the winch mounted in the bumper and the bumper on the truck.
We decided to put the control unit outboard of the frame rail on the passenger side of the truck. It was convenient for battery hookup and also close to the electrical hookups on the winch. The inital plan was to drill and tap a pair of holes in the frame just inboard of the crash bar for M6x1.0 bolts and mount the winch that way with the brackets usually used for mounting it on the motor side of the winch. Ford wasn't kidding about these frames being hard steel; after breaking first a drill bit and then a tap, we decided to go with plan B and Josef welded a simple bracket to the frame, allowing me to mount the control box vertically in the same location we'd already been eyeing. This also meant I was able to mount the control unit with the remote plug and the wireless control switch facing down.
(in place, wiring partially routed)
The 18" leads that come with the winch were, at this point, not going to reach, so I bought all three 29", 4-gauge battery cables at my local NAPA, and used those instead. They seemed barely long enough during installation, but now that I've got everything in place, I think I may be been able to get away with slightly shorter, had they been available. Note that the SmittyBilt documentation does not show which lead goes to which connection on the control unit, so make note (or take a photo like the one below) before disassembly.
My cable routing is below the frame rail, which I'm not excited about, but that point is still above the bottom of the bumper and well above the lower control-arm mount, so it doesn't seem to be particularly likely to catch. The small ground wire from the control unit (in the 18-gauge neighborhood, not four-gauge) I grounded to a normal chassis ground. The battery positive (to the control unit) and negative (from the accessory-connection point at the battery terminal to the winch itself) were relatively easy to route downward from the battery, but I wish the cables were a few inches shorter...I ended up with a little extra and wasn't able to keep the routing quite as pretty as I'd like.
Before I could finalize routing, though, I wanted to get the bumper and winch mounted. I did also install one pair of fog lights, as I wasn't sure how hard it would be to reach and do so with the bumper in place (answer: easy). I'm planning to put driving lights rather than fogs in the inboard buckets, but that will have to wait until my credit card recovers from the bumper, winch, and winch accessories. I did need to add a washer to the hardware included with the light (photo), but the light-mounting system is dead-nuts simple and should accomdate a wide variety of correclty-sized lighting, as well as providing plenty of ability to adjust aim in three dimensions. Also, on a side note, I sourced a pair of plugs from Amazon that allowed me to plug directly in to the factory wiring. Given that even moderately bright LEDs should draw less current than the factory halogens, I'm thinking this should work fine.
Getting the bumper loosely in place was relatively easy; we were able to support it on a low stool, then rock it up onto the brackets and push a couple of bolts through, which was enough to keep it from rolling back on top of us while we installed nuts on those bolts. This, however, was where it got to the "and now I remember why I pay people to work on cars" bit. To reach the outboard side of the bracket bolt/nut assembly, you need to reach in from the outboard side of the bumper and then up, in order to clear the lower boxing-in of the bracket. The amount of space between the inboard light bucket and the bracket makes for a rather tight squeeze, especially when trying to actually get a wrench on the nuts and apply torque. The inboard side is easy to reach via the winch-access portal, although the passenger's side required a shallower socket due to the proxmity of the winch motor.
Oh, and of course, the bumper-to-bracket attachment points are slotted to allow for slight variations in vehicle shape. So the really fun part is trying to hold one of these hard-to-reach nuts while tighening the appropriate bolt...before your assistant has to stop lifting the bumper into its final position. We tried for a while at the end of the night, but it ended up being far easier to jack up the bumper (one jack and a block of wood on each side of the middle, with the wood bridging from the shackle mount to the back of the bumper and the jack slightly after of center), then use tall objects and straps to pull upwards on each corner via the prerunner bar (on one side, I had the pallet from the bumper shipment leaning against the edge of the bumper and a camlock strap to the top of it; on the other, I had a hoist frame and ratchet strap). Just to indicate how much upward force I ended up applying to hold the bumper where I wanted it, after securing all eight bolts, I realized there was still significant tension on that driver's-side ratchet strap. Loosening it allowed the whole front end of the truck to drop at least an inch, but the bumper stayed put.
After mounting up the bumper, I spent some time tidying up winch wiring, attached the winch positive lead to the battery, and spooled the rope onto the drum. Upon looking the next morning, I realized that the winch rope was contacting some of the remaining intercooler-ducting plastic, so I unspooled again (by hand), and spent some time with a hacksaw, Dremel, and similar implements of destruction to first take the plastic lip further back (basically to the edge of the shutter frame) and then smooth it out with a number of Dremel-sanding passes. As you can see below, I just barely have clearance between the plastic and the rope now, so paying attention while respooling will be important (look between rope and plastic in rear of photo). Also, you can see the rougher cut in the foreground; I didn't bother smoothing that because it's outside of the rope pathway, but that should give an idea of what "too rough" looks like. Compare to an unmolested shutter assembly photo to see where the ribs end, and you'll see how far back I had to trim.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/4V...w1482-h2634-no
I put about 200 miles on the truck today, after installing the bumper. I was curious as to whether or not I'd be able to feel a difference with the weight there, and initially I couldn't. However, a couple of hours in, I came into a hairpin on a Chief Joseph Highway a little hot, and I could feel the front end pulling more to the outside of the corner than I expected. I don't think that was psychosomatic; I wasn't expecting it at that point (definitely caught me off-guard), but I'm not too surprised that trying to drive my truck like a sports car after hanging over 180 pounds of additional weight on the nose isn't a great idea.
Speaking of weight on the nose, I parked in my usual street-side, almost-flat spot this evening. I had previously measured 6.5" between the top of my tread and the fender on each side. Tonight, I measured 6" on one side and 6.25" on the other. I'm guessing that I must be a little futher onto the grass than last time, and that probably translates to a nose drop of about 0.25-0.35".
Also, speaking of crash bars: they were not in the way at all, but they are visible from certain angles (particularly side-on or from the rear). If you're particularly concerned about the aesthetics, that may be a consideration; I'll just plan to keep in in mind when taking photos.
We decided to put the control unit outboard of the frame rail on the passenger side of the truck. It was convenient for battery hookup and also close to the electrical hookups on the winch. The inital plan was to drill and tap a pair of holes in the frame just inboard of the crash bar for M6x1.0 bolts and mount the winch that way with the brackets usually used for mounting it on the motor side of the winch. Ford wasn't kidding about these frames being hard steel; after breaking first a drill bit and then a tap, we decided to go with plan B and Josef welded a simple bracket to the frame, allowing me to mount the control box vertically in the same location we'd already been eyeing. This also meant I was able to mount the control unit with the remote plug and the wireless control switch facing down.
(in place, wiring partially routed)The 18" leads that come with the winch were, at this point, not going to reach, so I bought all three 29", 4-gauge battery cables at my local NAPA, and used those instead. They seemed barely long enough during installation, but now that I've got everything in place, I think I may be been able to get away with slightly shorter, had they been available. Note that the SmittyBilt documentation does not show which lead goes to which connection on the control unit, so make note (or take a photo like the one below) before disassembly.
My cable routing is below the frame rail, which I'm not excited about, but that point is still above the bottom of the bumper and well above the lower control-arm mount, so it doesn't seem to be particularly likely to catch. The small ground wire from the control unit (in the 18-gauge neighborhood, not four-gauge) I grounded to a normal chassis ground. The battery positive (to the control unit) and negative (from the accessory-connection point at the battery terminal to the winch itself) were relatively easy to route downward from the battery, but I wish the cables were a few inches shorter...I ended up with a little extra and wasn't able to keep the routing quite as pretty as I'd like.
Before I could finalize routing, though, I wanted to get the bumper and winch mounted. I did also install one pair of fog lights, as I wasn't sure how hard it would be to reach and do so with the bumper in place (answer: easy). I'm planning to put driving lights rather than fogs in the inboard buckets, but that will have to wait until my credit card recovers from the bumper, winch, and winch accessories. I did need to add a washer to the hardware included with the light (photo), but the light-mounting system is dead-nuts simple and should accomdate a wide variety of correclty-sized lighting, as well as providing plenty of ability to adjust aim in three dimensions. Also, on a side note, I sourced a pair of plugs from Amazon that allowed me to plug directly in to the factory wiring. Given that even moderately bright LEDs should draw less current than the factory halogens, I'm thinking this should work fine.
Getting the bumper loosely in place was relatively easy; we were able to support it on a low stool, then rock it up onto the brackets and push a couple of bolts through, which was enough to keep it from rolling back on top of us while we installed nuts on those bolts. This, however, was where it got to the "and now I remember why I pay people to work on cars" bit. To reach the outboard side of the bracket bolt/nut assembly, you need to reach in from the outboard side of the bumper and then up, in order to clear the lower boxing-in of the bracket. The amount of space between the inboard light bucket and the bracket makes for a rather tight squeeze, especially when trying to actually get a wrench on the nuts and apply torque. The inboard side is easy to reach via the winch-access portal, although the passenger's side required a shallower socket due to the proxmity of the winch motor.
Oh, and of course, the bumper-to-bracket attachment points are slotted to allow for slight variations in vehicle shape. So the really fun part is trying to hold one of these hard-to-reach nuts while tighening the appropriate bolt...before your assistant has to stop lifting the bumper into its final position. We tried for a while at the end of the night, but it ended up being far easier to jack up the bumper (one jack and a block of wood on each side of the middle, with the wood bridging from the shackle mount to the back of the bumper and the jack slightly after of center), then use tall objects and straps to pull upwards on each corner via the prerunner bar (on one side, I had the pallet from the bumper shipment leaning against the edge of the bumper and a camlock strap to the top of it; on the other, I had a hoist frame and ratchet strap). Just to indicate how much upward force I ended up applying to hold the bumper where I wanted it, after securing all eight bolts, I realized there was still significant tension on that driver's-side ratchet strap. Loosening it allowed the whole front end of the truck to drop at least an inch, but the bumper stayed put.
After mounting up the bumper, I spent some time tidying up winch wiring, attached the winch positive lead to the battery, and spooled the rope onto the drum. Upon looking the next morning, I realized that the winch rope was contacting some of the remaining intercooler-ducting plastic, so I unspooled again (by hand), and spent some time with a hacksaw, Dremel, and similar implements of destruction to first take the plastic lip further back (basically to the edge of the shutter frame) and then smooth it out with a number of Dremel-sanding passes. As you can see below, I just barely have clearance between the plastic and the rope now, so paying attention while respooling will be important (look between rope and plastic in rear of photo). Also, you can see the rougher cut in the foreground; I didn't bother smoothing that because it's outside of the rope pathway, but that should give an idea of what "too rough" looks like. Compare to an unmolested shutter assembly photo to see where the ribs end, and you'll see how far back I had to trim.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/4V...w1482-h2634-no
I put about 200 miles on the truck today, after installing the bumper. I was curious as to whether or not I'd be able to feel a difference with the weight there, and initially I couldn't. However, a couple of hours in, I came into a hairpin on a Chief Joseph Highway a little hot, and I could feel the front end pulling more to the outside of the corner than I expected. I don't think that was psychosomatic; I wasn't expecting it at that point (definitely caught me off-guard), but I'm not too surprised that trying to drive my truck like a sports car after hanging over 180 pounds of additional weight on the nose isn't a great idea.
Speaking of weight on the nose, I parked in my usual street-side, almost-flat spot this evening. I had previously measured 6.5" between the top of my tread and the fender on each side. Tonight, I measured 6" on one side and 6.25" on the other. I'm guessing that I must be a little futher onto the grass than last time, and that probably translates to a nose drop of about 0.25-0.35".
Also, speaking of crash bars: they were not in the way at all, but they are visible from certain angles (particularly side-on or from the rear). If you're particularly concerned about the aesthetics, that may be a consideration; I'll just plan to keep in in mind when taking photos.
10-08-2017, 08:42 AM
#3
Senile member
I think it looks great, thought my only suggestion would be to consider making some ducts to run air to the intercooler. Blocking the direct-forward flow is going to definitely affect it...so if you manage to duct air to it, that may work out even better.
11-28-2017, 10:12 AM
#4
Junior Member
Join Date: Jul 2017
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Front License Plate
Great post, but I am wondering, do you not need to run a front license plate in the state you live?
If you have to run a front plate and want to install a winch, what would you do?
If you have to run a front plate and want to install a winch, what would you do?
11-28-2017, 10:28 AM
#5
Looks great. Say I was thinkin about the nokian lt2 tires. I run then on my subarus and my work van. How are you liking them?
thanks
@IronMike08 edit this post is ove a year old lol and he zip ties his plate to his bumper, I saw it on his build thread.
thanks
@IronMike08 edit this post is ove a year old lol and he zip ties his plate to his bumper, I saw it on his build thread.
Last edited by Montuckyf150; 11-28-2017 at 10:39 AM.
11-28-2017, 11:52 AM
#6
I'd be looking at an intercooler upgrade... go to a Full Race or comparable up in the grille, so you aren't fighting that issue. Oh, and the protector plate for the winch really needs a paint job... that light grey just looks out of place on an otherwise dark-grey-and-black truck.
Otherwise, nice writeup!
Otherwise, nice writeup!
11-28-2017, 01:29 PM
#7
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Thanks, I just saw the license plate mount on the build thread, thanks, but post is less than 2 months old - Oct 2017 - LOL
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11-28-2017, 01:42 PM
#8
Senior Member
Thread Starter
The LT2s have been good so far; i don't have a ton of miles on them, and the temps shot back up into the fifties in town last week, but the two times I drove up to the ski mountain last weekend in packed snow they were great, and they did well on the ice remnants as well this weekend. Pavement performance definitely isn't as good as the AT tires were, but that's a trade-off i'm willing to make for better traction on packed snow and ice.
11-28-2017, 02:12 PM
#9
Senior Member
Looks awesome in general, one thing that would bug the ever living crap out of me though is the way it looks in that 3rd from last pic (from the side, showing the tire). If the end of the bumper matched the curve of the wheel well better...
...but who am I to complain, my truck is stock because I'm too cheap to spend money on the things I'd like to do (two teenagers playing sports keep me both ridiculously busy and as broke as I am willing to be).
...but who am I to complain, my truck is stock because I'm too cheap to spend money on the things I'd like to do (two teenagers playing sports keep me both ridiculously busy and as broke as I am willing to be).
11-28-2017, 02:18 PM
#10
Senior Member
Thread Starter
Looks awesome in general, one thing that would bug the ever living crap out of me though is the way it looks in that 3rd from last pic (from the side, showing the tire). If the end of the bumper matched the curve of the wheel well better...
...but who am I to complain, my truck is stock because I'm too cheap to spend money on the things I'd like to do (two teenagers playing sports keep me both ridiculously busy and as broke as I am willing to be).
...but who am I to complain, my truck is stock because I'm too cheap to spend money on the things I'd like to do (two teenagers playing sports keep me both ridiculously busy and as broke as I am willing to be).
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TX Iron (12-19-2017)