Project Winch Bumper

My buddie and me are designing and fabing a winch bumper for my xj
using ol TJ winch plate and good old Steel.
take a look.


sides of bumper taking shape...




far from done, but it will be done tomorrow night!!!
and when we are done... it will look something like this...

Couple things: the front two bolts should go to a piece of angle iron that bolts to the front crossmember (search for pics of stock towhook setups to see what I mean). Alternatively you could consider building a front crossmember "einforcälent that would not only taje càe of that but would also help spread the load on side pulls.
Also: how thick is that Òweel? The main pieces that go ðlonf th$!frame rail that is: if it's 3/16 that's a wee bit on the thin side. I went with 1/2" for mine and brought it `il the way up front and that way I also have a nice beefy d ring mount.

ok all the fab work is done, now all i need to do is paint it and wheel it



very happy with it, basically the way i saw it in my head. i think some round lights will fill in the void beside the winch just fine!

Nice job.
Have you thought of skinning the outter ends of the bumber?

Nice work.

#1: Diggin the ZJ V8 tie-rod, I've been running one with a locked D30 for a while now and it's held up fine. Not that this has anything to do with anything.

#2: Looks to me like all your mounting for the winch basket is single-plane, i.e., all on one piece of steel. The best way IMO to mount something like that to the unibody is to have it mounted on several planes, like either along the front crossmember like Kejtar suggested, or along the bottom of the frame rails. This will help deal with the wide variety of weird-angle pulls you'll encounter with winching.

Here's a few things I did, to possibly give you some ideas:

A while ago when I first made my towhook brackets (since decommisioned):


Used the bottom frame rail hole. A pain in the ass to get a bolt/nut through, but worked wonders compared to some other manufacturers' brackets.

edit: dammit, can't find pics of the other thing...but I took some 3/16" plate and welded it along the inside of the front bumper mount bolts with the nutserts removed, and welded/gusseted it to the front crossmember as well. Then replaced all those metric little bolts with larger grade-8s. So far I've stalled my M8000 three times and broken the winch cable twice, and none of the mounts have moved. I'm also running the winch like this:



and I've had many sidepulls and weird angles, and the hitch mount/bumper has held up fine. I've got my bumper mounted down along the frame rails to many holes, and also underneath like in that one pic.

If it's not too much trouble, might consider adding something like that.