Building A Heavy Duty Off Road Bumper (Weld It Yourself DIY Kit) - Toyota Rock Crawler (2023)

Introduction

Building a weld it yourself bumper kit for my Toyota Pickup rock crawler! This kit is from NWTI, Northwest Trail Innovations, and comes with all the pieces you need to build your own custom off-road front plate bumper for your 4x4 truck, as well as tube for the stinger and side braces, and huge 3/4" thick shackle mounts. We also install a frame reinforcement plate to support this bumper and if we ever use it as a recovery point or install a winch, since the factory frame is pretty weak right there. Finally I have full body armor!

Specs on the truck:
► 1988 Toyota Pickup
► 22RE and W56
► SAS with an 83 front axle, gussetted and trussed (straight axle swap)
► Chromoly 30 spline axles, longfields (front and rear)
► 5.29 gears, triple drilled flanges, etc
► Rear locker, yukon Grizzly: amzn.to/3upkBm6
► Dual transfer cases, 2.28 and 4.70
► 37x12.50x17 Cooper Discoverer STT PRO
► NWTI front bumper, Trail-Gear sliders, custom rear bumper
► Thick wall driveshafts
► 4" lift front and rear

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*Camera Equipment Used in This Video!:*
Sony ZV1 Camera: amzn.to/3VX5koq
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Tripod: amzn.to/3BcYiDL

Ft. @GrindHardPlumbingCo on the fridge at the beginning :D

#rmgarage #offroad #toyota #bumper #armor #rockcrawler #4x4

Video

So today, we're going to be building a bumper for my 1988.

Toyota, pickup.

I picked up a cool weld it yourself kit from a company called nwti.

If you don't know what a weld it yourself kit is it's.

Just a bumper that comes in a bunch of pieces that you weld together, and it makes a bumper so we're gonna head over to my friend's house, right now, they're all welders and they're gonna help me get this project done.

So here are all the parts that come with the kit.

You have the body pieces.

And then the main winch plate area there with these huge tow hooks.

This front piece, right here actually goes on the front of the truck because the stock mounting area is super weak.

And this area can actually break so we're going to drill out all the factory hardware points weld this on.

And it came with some gussets to actually guss it to the frame of the truck as well.

We've got to get this old bumper off disconnect, the turn signals and get the frame ready for welding on the new frame.

Brace we need to weld nuts on the back of it so that it has threads we're effectively removing the weak factory bumper mount and installing a 3 8 thick plate with gussets that can support this new bumper and anything we throw at it.

So so these kits come together with pieces that kind of go together like legos.

You just set them up tack them together.

And then we will finish weld this winch assembly once everything looks square and good to go.

The main winch plate is together and welded.

And now we have these little shackle mounts that are gonna sit right here.

There's a little, uh, front section.

Here that's gonna go over those mounts like this, and then there's a ramp that goes under it and welds.

Right here.

Once this whole assembly is welded together.

We can mount it on the truck and start fitting the body of the bumper.

I think it's starting to look like a bumper now we're fitting up the pieces that make the body of the bumper.

These kits come with instructions.

So, you know what piece goes where and they're also labeled I'm holding this top plate in place.

And my buddy, chris is lining up the front plate while ryan tacks these into place, we're just tacking everything right now, since we still want to be able to move things around if we need to.

And in case, we mess up, we don't want to have to grind a weld it's.

A lot easier to just grind or break attack after everything looks right.

We'll, finish weld all right so it's all coming together.

It finally looks like a bumper at this point, there's, a bunch of little pieces that build the body.

They just kind of fit together, and you tackle them into place, and you can kind of custom fit it for your own application, there's little gaps that we'll probably have to fill.

But for the most part, it fits the body lines really well and looks really good we're, stitch welding in one to two inch sections constantly moving around the bumper as not to warp it.

Once the whole thing is welded, we'll, take a flap disc for the welds and smooth everything out.

Then we have to fit the stinger and move on to paint.

So all right, we got the bumper on fully installed totally welded and ground down all of those welds with a flap disc.

Actually they did all the work over here.

So now we're trying to get this tube cut at the right angle for the stinger it's kind of hard to do the math, because we don't really know what we're doing finding that angle.

But we want to lean forward a little bit this way.

And then it has these little side, braces too.

And these did not come notched or anything so we're going to have to cut these to length and notch them to properly brace up that stinger so we're going to work on that right now, the grinder wasn't plugged in we have this guy that almost cut his entire hand off with the grinder using the grinder again, hopefully we don't have any issues here.

We just held this up to the side of the table angled where we wanted it to be and kind of just drew a line.

So I guess we'll see if this works.

So I think it's, good I'm, honestly, shocked, uh, with how good that came out just from drawing it on with the sharpie that hoop actually fit really well, they're welding it on right now.

The last part is going to be installing these braces and we're going to have to notch the front area and then angle, the rear area of this tube to make it fit properly.

So we got to decide what angle we want it to sit against the actual stinger.

And then how like in board we want to run it.

So once these are done we'll be finished with the bumper there's, a pretty easy bumper to build actually, uh, you know, having friends that are welders does help a lot.

But the whole process took about, I don't know around six hours or so so we're doing the same thing we did on the other pipe, just made a sharpie line.

This one we're really not sure of at all.

So hopefully that thing ends up at the right angle we're going for 30 degrees.

It actually fits well all right.

So now we're working on notching.

The tube I'll be honest with you guys, we're kind of just throwing around measurements here and cutting and hoping that it fits and so far it's been working pretty well.

Ricky wants it.

I don't know what you're doing.

So we have to knock the tube more this.

Yeah, yeah, it's, not national.

So all right.

So the bumper's done, we were able to get those angles cut out and the notches done.

This one is a little bit lower than the other one.

We don't hide mistakes on this channel, but it's the best we can really do when we're getting angles with sharpies.

And you got three neanderthals in the garage, just kind of banging their heads, trying to figure out how to get the right notch and how to get the right angle.

So, yeah, the bumpers on there gonna paint it up tomorrow huge.

Thank you to my friends, ryan and chris for helping me out here.

It really helps having friends that are welders who basically can build anything for this truck.

They help me with the sliders as well.

The only thing that they did not help in terms of armor is this rear bumper as you can see this thing is kind of a piece of crap and not something that would ever come out of this garage.

So, yeah, things looking really cool and we're gonna take this thing off and paint it tomorrow.

I got the bumper all painted up.

And when I was primary in this thing, the primer was old, it was kind of coming out in like a powdered texturey format.

So I was gonna paint it with textured paint anyway, which I did as you can see here.

And I thought that the textured paint would cover some of that some of that primer mess up, but there's, a couple areas where it just didn't and that's.

Okay, we'll just touch it up in the future.

But the bumper looks really good super happy with it.

It made the front of this truck look completely completely different looks a lot more aggressive and tough on the front end.

So really happy with how that turned out looks absolutely amazing on there, all right guys that wraps up today's video.

Thank you for following along throughout this project.

This was a super fun bumper to build.

And thank you to my friends that helped me along the way if you're into build videos, how-to videos or off-roading videos, feel free to subscribe to the channel and you'll see a lot more of this content coming your way and I'll catch you guys in the next one later you.