During the installation of my bar I modified the center hoop so that it was no longer chromed. This turned out to be a good move since I was now looking at doing something else with the hoop. In short, because it was no longer chrome, I could now weld on it!!

PHASE I

So how to improve upon this fine bumper? The center hoop is the limiting factor as the hoop is bolted on to the body of the bumper. This give one two choices, replace it or work with it. Since I have already had the center hoop power coated, I chose to work with the existing hoop.

One major obstacle that I faced was access to a tube bender. Clearly I was not going to be able to fab something out of square or rectangular tubing like I used for my rock sliders, so I had to use round tube to match the center hoop. No having $500 or more to shell out for a bender, a friend turned me on to a most reasonable alternative: a pipe bender! I scored one from Harbor Freight for only $85. It came with several dies to work with schedule 40 pipe. I have not had much success with the 3/4" bends (not at a 90 degree bend anyway), but the 1" pipe bends quite nicely to a 90. So I stocked up on on some schedule 40 1" black pipe and went to work!  For the smaller sized pipe, it has been suggested to fill it up with sand before bending to help avoid kinking.

After doing some measuring (actually lots of measuring!!) here is what I ended up with:

Since the center hoop was going to be a part of the mounting for the new bar, I needed to be able to secure the ends. The ARB bumper comes with a very nice powdercoating on it so i did not want to weld the ends in place. Welding the ends would also no make much sense since the center hoop would loose its ability to be removable. So I ended up plugging the end of the new bar and tapping it and drilled a hole through the top of the bumper to be able to seat it.

    

Next came the hard part. I had to secure the new bar to the center hoop. I thought about fabing some sort of clamp to hold the two together, but decided that some simple 1" tack welds would do the job and preserve the natural lines of the bar. So I sanded off the powder coat and tacked her in place. I t was a difficult position to weld out of, but I got the job done decently. After some painting, here is how Phase I came out!

        

PHASE II

I was very happy with how Phase I turned out, so now to do even more. ARB offers side rails as an option with their Bull Bars on Toyota Landcruisers, so since I have a Sahara Bull Bar now, I need some side rails dammit! Lucky for me, my rock sliders were built it such a manner as to be conducive to side rails attachment (I am so lucky, I mean clever!!)

The bends for this project are a bit more complex as prefitting is not as easy. The first bend needed to accommodate the fact that the new bar does not extend all the way to the side of the front quarter panel. I would have fabed the bar to this spec, but 180 degree bends are not do-able with my cheapy bender. No worries tho. Here is the bender in action:

        

 

After welding on a stud to the new bar to receive the front end of the side rail, and welding on a bracket to bolt the rear end of the rail to my sliders, it was ready for sanding (the pipe come pre-coated with some sort of urethane that is unevenly applied), priming, and test fitting! Here is the semi-final result:

        

Nice! Some quick painting with my favorite car color, black, and it is ready for mounting.

Next I swapped out the wire rope for some high quality synthetic line. I choose to go with X-line from Off Road Only. I could not use the warn fairlead with this line as it will chew it up, so I got a hawse fairlead from them with the line. The only problem was that the recess for the fairlead in the ARB was designed around the roller style. Thus the hawse fairlead was too shallow. So I fabbed up some spacers so that the line won't get hung up on any part of the bar.

        

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Last modified: July 21, 2004