Moving on to today's job, I finished the extra mounts for the front bumper. As mentioned earlier, I found that when winching in to stow the hook, the winch when going tight, could move the bumper slightly. At present I only had the std four bolt fixings so I decided to reinforce the bumper mounts.
I needed to ensure that the bumper could take a significant hit from the front without moving and to do this I welded on two more mounts that would fit directly to the winch tray.
If you have seen the winch build then you will see that I welded an 8mm THK plate to the front chassis to take the winch. The new mounts secured to this and therefore will transmit any force straight to both legs of the chassis which is basic mechanics. The chassis is more than strong enough to take heavy impact and any impact that can deform the legs will leave me not bothering as I will be in a coma lol.
Here's some pics.
First off the winch plate. Here you can see the holes for the mounts. 1 10mm and 1 12mm bolt per mount.
Here are the months themselves. Basically I used the last of my 6mm THK angle. With the bumper bolted in place to the chassis legs, I placed the new mounts in position and clamped them to the bumper. Then I drilled the holes and bolted them in place. Whilst still clamped to the bumper, I tacked the nuts in position and then tacked the angle to the bumper.
I then removed the bumper complete and seam welded the mounts
Now it's all together and a quick test by driving into a tree resulted in 100% success.lol
Now the next thing is to finalise the recovery points, so any suggestions? What do you guys use?