Custom Front Bumper, Rear Step Bumper, Lightbars & Roof Rack

 

Heavy duty Steel Front Bumper. See what happened when a Honda hit this bumper.

Heavy duty Steel Front Bumper

Rear Step Bumper

Shown are Hella 90601 Spot Worklight and Hella 90600 Flood Worklight about 70.00 each.

This is a picture of Steve Yee's truck out in AZ. His idea is Instead of doing a light bar, get yourself a set of Thule mounts and load bars.

You'll need a 387 high gutter mount kit, and a set of LB72 load bars. Steve has his strobes mounted to these and they work very well. If you use rectangular lamps, you can place them underneath the bar, or if you have clearance, place them above. You can walk away with the whole set for about 200 bucks. It's far cheaper than trying to do a light bar, and you'll have it set for front and back. REI among others sell Thule.

The Thule parts are modular so you can put together any kind of configuration you need. Thule has 2 heights on the gutter mounts. When you measure make sure to take into account the roof curature.

Thule also has roof top carriers that attach to the cross bars and hitch mount bike racks.

There's some definite advantages to the Thule rack:
- Lightweight
- Each crossbar can handle 165 pounds of weight (actually, more like 200)
- Easily repaired:  Any bike shop carries parts
- Easily acquired:  Any bike shop carries it.
- Easily removable - just unscrew the gutter mounts.
- Secure - They have locking cores that all are keyed alike
- Modular.  Start with two, work your way to more as you need it or can afford it.
- Flexible.  Add stuff you need - baskets, cargo carrier pods, bike racks, canoe racks, whatever!

I wanted to let everyone who is running a Thule rack know of a little improvement that I've done to help secure the Thule rack down a bit more. After my trip to Box Canyon/Martinez Cabin/Martinez Canyon, it was discovered that the Thule solution, while viable, is not very strong at it's weakest point - the hand tightened bolts to the rain gutters.

To solve the problem, I went to the local Ace Hardware store, and got myself a bunch of Metric 8mm nuts (fine thread) with lock washers, and tightened down the bolts like crazy. This thing now won't budge one bit - it's really, really locked down.