A couple months ago Eric and I were at Pick-A-Part and we came across a late 80's full size Bronco with a prerunner bumper. We decided to cut it off and see if we could make it work on his Explorer since it only cost $40. The bumber is made of 1.5 DOM tubing and had an aluminum skid plate.
About a week after we got it I decided to start working on it. I hung it off the bumper on my Explorer so I could see just how much too wide it was. Turned out that I needed to take roughly 10 inches off it to make it about the same width as mine. So I cut 10 inches out of the middle. To do so, I had to cut three tubes which you can see in the pictures. It worked out well because originally the bumper had two vertical bars to create three sections for lights. The middle section was about 11 inches so now it still has the two verticle bars but they are about 1 inch apart. After I cut the tubing out I used three pieces of 1.25 DOM that were about 5 inches long to sleeve the bumper and then welded it back together. It took me about 4 hours to complete.
Last night Eric and I cut the old bumper brackets off his Explorer and then plated the ends so we had mounting points for the new bumper. We finally finished at about 11:30pm. Here's some pictures Eric took of the install.
The funny part about it is that I have only burnt my foot once while welding and it was when I was wearing shoes. The slag fell into the top of my shoe and I couldn't get it out.
How do you bend those pipes? Does he have a pipe bender?
We didn't bend anything. If I need to do any bending I have to go to my buddy Joe's house to use his bender. He's the one who bent the main hoop for RxSnake.
Eric's New/Old Prerunner Bumper
