In this episode of FullDroopTV, we fabricate
a prerunner bumper for Project Chevy Silverado. Then we light the way with LED off-road lights. FullDroopTV starts now. This episode of FullDroopTV is brought to
you in part by KC HiLiTES. Welcome to another episode of FullDroopTV. In our last episode, you saw us build a custom
rear bumper for our prerunner. It had an integrated tire carrier, and some
LEDs provided by KC HiLiTES. In this episode, we’re going to be tackling
our front bumper. Now, a front bumper on a prerunner isn’t just
a place to hang off-road lights. It’s built to add serious protection to the
front end of our prerunner. The main tube of our bumper is going to wrap
around the front of the truck here.
From that point we’re going to run aluminum
skid plate that goes all the way to protect the front cross member. We’ll also be adding a ABS plastic valance
to the front of this which is something you’d see on a race truck. Later on we’re going to be adding some of
these LED light bars that we got from KC HiLiTES and we’ll talk more about these later on in
the show. Let’s get started. In order to know where to place the main tube
for our front bumper, we’ve been using this piece of scrap tubing and just trying gauge
how far out away from the front we want to be.
After we came up a location, we’ve made some
cardboard templates, transferred them on steel, and cut them out with our plasma cutter. We’re cutting our mounting plates out of three
sixteenths inch steel. Now what we’ll do is place them on the frame
itself and weld them in. That will give us a location for the front
tube land. Now that we have our frame mounts welded in
place, we’ve put this piece of scrap tubing in as a reference to show you where the main
tube for our bumper is going to go. We’re actually going that bent up, we’ll bring
it back to the truck and weld it into these pockets. After we get it welded in, we’re going to
fully box these frame mounts on top and bottom. We’ve marked out our first two bends on the
two inch 120 wall tube.
We’re going to bend those up and then check
it on the frame. Now that we have our main tube bent, we’re
going cut the excess off using a cutoff wheel and grinder. We’ve cut these plates out to box in our frame
mounts for the front bumper. This plate will actually recess in here like
so, giving me a nice place to weld this entire seam all the way around. Now the reason we didn’t recess the top plate
is because I won’t be able to fit the gun inside to weld that seam. So we overlapped it on the outside so I can
come from the underside and weld that entire seam all the way down. All that’s left is to get them burned in. We were playing around with the idea of how
to mount our KC HiLiTES light bars to our front bumper. We thought maybe we’ll mount them directly
to this tube and run a conventional prerunner style hoop above. We wanted something with a little more style,
so what we came up with is this.
This is a essentially going to be cut out
of flat plate. We have two holes here where we’re going to
run tubes completely through to the other side, they’ll be two of these plates. And then it weld in and our lights will actually
mount inside this box structure. So let’s get these transferred on to steel
and cut them out. We’ve cut our horizontal tubes for this structure
and then capped them on the ends. Now that we’ve laid it out, we’ve got thirty
four inches between each plate. The reason we went with thirty four inches
is that’s the perfect amount of spacing for all of our KC HiLiTES LEDs. Once we tack this up, we’ll take it over to
the truck, test it out, as long as it’s good, we’ll burn it all in. Our bumper’s really starting to take shape. You can see how much protection this going
to provide our lights. So now that we’ve tacked it place and squared
it, we checked level, all that’s left is to burn it in. We used a piece of three quarter inch masking
tape to act as a visual reference for a tube that we want to place between this flat plate
and the bumper structure.
The masking tape allows you to take a step
back away from the truck and look at the body lines, look at the design of the bumper and
see if that tube in that location would flow with everything you going on. After we decided on on design that we liked,
we cut and notched two tubes. This one I’ve already tacked in place. We’re going to get the other tacked in place
and them we’ll burn them in. We’ve cut and notched two tubes for our skid
plate to mount to. These tubes are going to run from the main
hoop of our bumper down to this front crossmember. What that’s going do is create a triangulation
effect and it’s going to add strength in to this entire front frame section.
Once we get these welded in, we’ll be showing
what kind of material we’re using for the skid plate. We’ve laid out our skid plate on our aluminum
sheet. We’re using three sixteenths thick 60 61 aircraft
grade aluminum for overall strength. After we get it cut out with the plasma cutter,
we’ll clean up the edges and use tabs to mount it to our bumper. I’m ready to weld on the tabs that are going
to mount our skid plate to these tubes.
What I did is I prepped the tab by welding
a nut to the back side of it. The reason I did that is because there’s very
little access to the skid plate. So the bolts will actually just run up through
the backside and being welded on, I never have to worry about them coming loose. Now I clamped this piece of tubing in place
to mimic the plane that the skid plate will be in, so when I put the tab in place, all
I have to do is tack it and I know it’s going to lay flat on that skid plate. We use some soft clamps to hold our skid plate
in place, that way we can mark it from the back side through the tab just like this. Reach in there, mark them all out. Then I can pull the skid plate off and drill
it, throw it back on, put the bolts in. In our last episode, you saw us use a pair
of these KC HiLiTES three inch LED cube as reverse on our rear bumper. Well today we’ve got another pair that we’re
going to be using alongside with these then inch light bars that we also got from KC HiLiTES.
They feature 20 five watt LED that produce
four thousand lumens of light and it’s all encased in this extruded aluminum housing
to help dissipate any heat generated by the LEDs. Now these cubes, the type of LEDs that they
use are a spot pattern, so it gives you a long range. The light bars here, they feature a combination
of spot pattern and flood pattern LEDs, so you get a wide dispersion of light and you
also get the range that you’re looking for. And this is how we put them in. We’ve got our mounting tabs bolted to the
bottom side of the light. We’re going to drop the light into position
on the marks that I’ve made.
These marks give me the exact spacing that
I’m looking for between each light and between tab. I’m going to tack each tab in place. That’s why we have this masking tape over
the lens to keep it protected from any weld spatter. Once I tack it in place, we’ll remove the
light and finish all the welding. Now we could have tacked these tabs in place
without having them bolted to the light.
But keeping them bolted to the light keeps
everything square and allows you to see the positioning of the light before you commit
to actually welding this tab completely to the tube. To finish off our front bumper we’re going
to be adding an ABS plastic valance. Now this something you might see on race truck. Racers use it to increase the aerodynamics
across the front end. We’re doing it just to add some style to our
front end. We’ve made up this paper template. We’re going to get this transferred on to
the ABS and then cut out. To mount our valance, we picked up this package
of ten tabs and fasteners. Now what that includes is ten of these machined
aluminum fender washers, ten bolts and ten tabs. Now they give you two different nut options. First one being this weldable version. It would go on the back side of the tab and
give you a nice place to weld in all the way around.
Now the option we’re going to be using since
we have access to the back of the tab is a traditional nylocks nut. With a nylocks, we don’t ever have to worry
about vibration backing the nut off. We made all of our cuts using a jig saw and
we followed them up with a metal file to clean up the edges. Now to mount our valance, we’re going to be
using three locations.
One here in the back corner that going to
bolt through the factory bumper, another mount right here in the bend, and one on the leading
edge. Now we’re going to start in the back corner
so that way we can get our valance lines to line up with the cuts we made in our factory
bumper. Well now that we have the back portion of
our valance bolted in place, we’re going to move up to the front, we’re going to cut the
tab and drill the valance to actually bolt this portion in place. That will give us the exact line that it’s
going to follow, that way we can this middle tab slid in place and tacked in. FDTV Talk is presented by Prerunner Maniac. Welcome to FDTV Talk where we answer your
questions about prerunners. And today’s question comes from Mike and he
asks… I wanted to get some lights for my truck so
I wondering if should get HIDs or LEDs. When you’re looking for off-road lighting,
it can be confusing. You’ve got so many different options to choose.
The newest technology right now happens to
be these LED light bars. They offer a ton of light and they use very
little power. But they do have one slight limitation and
that’s they’re range. Now if you’re mounting these on side by side
or a prerunner, you’re never going to outrun their light. But if you’re considering lighting for your
sandrail or a race truck, you might want to go with an HID bulb. Now with the HID they have a specially designed
reflector that allows them shoot a very long beam of light. So my suggestion would be combine the both
of them. Get a set of HIDs and a pair of LEDs. So that way you have your wide dispersion
of light with the LEDs and you get that very, very long range with the HIDs. So I hope that answers your question, Mike. And remember, if you want a question answered
on air, visit FullDroopTV.com and click on the FDTV Talk icon. And that does it for another episode of FullDroopTV. You can see we got the fabrication on our
front bumper completed, we’ve got our LEDs by KC HiLiTES mounted and the skid plate we
fabricated is going to protect the front cross member of this Silverado.
We even added a valance to give it that race
truck look. And in our next episode we’re going to be
adding some power back to this SIlverado in the form of an Airaid intake and a Magnaflow
exhaust. And if you have any questions about the products
we used on this show, visit FullDroopTV.com So until next time, we’ll see you in
the dirt.
