I've been busy and slightly injured the past two weeks, so no fabrication.  Today I got my gimpy self out in the garage for some slow-going fabrication on the rear bumper.

Despite being nearly 1/4-inch thick in the center, the stock crossmember was bent, rusted, and just nasty looking.  Plus I'm pretty sick of spending an hour to clean up the stock frame to weld on a piece it took 20-minutes to built.  It's just more time effective to start replacing the factory frame where applicable.  Ideally I'd build another rectangular crossmember/bumper out of some thin walled rectangular tubing with dimple die'd holes, but since I don't have a dimple die or a press I opted for regular old 1-3/4 DOM tubing. 

I started off by using my Milwaukee Hole Shooter with a 1-3/4 hole saw.  I measured carefully so the tube would be straight and square in the chassis.

I left part of the rear crossmember to prevent the framerails from bowing.  The Miller Spectrum 625 made short work of the factory crossmember.

The new round crossmember connects to a couple runners inside the framerail.  It's a lot stronger than just plating it in and the shorties also give me a place to attach crossmembers and the final portion of the rear cage when I build it.  I'm still too gimpy to use the bender, but you'll see in a future blog when I get to it. 

I tacked the new crossmember in before cutting away the offending part of the stock frame.  The runners were fully welded to the crossmember before I did the final install in the truck.  It took a little while to carefully trim the frame with both the plasma cutter and an angle grinder.  I wanted to leave just enough to partially fold over the tubing braces. 

The finished product looks a little spindly now, but once the fuel cell tubing is in and the spare tire carrier is built atop it and all the bracing is in I think it will look pretty good.  I left the tube ends open because I'll eventually mount either a swaybar through it or maybe some turned end caps.  Spikes maybe.  I don't know.