RoverTracks Land Rover Discovery off road winch bumper

I have been looking for a new bumper for my '03 Disco II for some time now. I wanted one that was high clearance, light weight, had a winch plate, and had a light bar on it. I've come across a few others, but I really didn't like the style, and for the price of these bumpers, I wasn't going to settle.

It just so happened that search for "Land Rover bumpers" on Ebay turned up a nice looking bumper by a fabricator named Sam. The bumper looked to be what I was looking for, but was mounted on a Disco I. I imediately shot Sam an email and he got back to me with in a hour saying the bumper would indeed fit on my Disco and that all I would have to do is relocate my washer fluid bottle. I emailed him back asking how hard this would be and he sent me a link:

Discoweb.org (I haven't done this yet, but expect a tutorial/account of how this went)

After a few days of pondering I bought the bumper. I paid for the bumper and it was in Denver (from Vegas), only a few days later. The bumper was packaged well (sorry didn't get any pictures of that part), but there were a few scratches on the A-bar from the screws in the box. I don't care about these for two reasons: 1. I touched it up with black paint and you can't even tell. 2. It's going to have a lot more scratches on it than that when I'm done with it... =). Some may take issue to that however.

When I got the bumper, it was exactly as described on ebay. Not only did it look great it was light and felt strong.

All and all, I found that the transaction with Sam went perfect and he was extremely helpful when ever I had a question. Not only that, but when I got the bumper mounted (see below), it was very stout and after using it to tow my buddies Jeep and having me and all my buddies climb on the bumeper, I felt I got my money's worth. And if there is one thing I could wine about, I would say I wish the bumper was powder coated. I will be buying rocker guards from Sam real soon (which look a lot better than any other I've come across).

To sum up the experience, I put together a little tutorial on putting the bumper on. It is just a quick over view of what I had to do and I basically just want to show how the bumper looks on my truck.

Enjoy:

Step one. Look at the truck with the stock bumper on it:



Step two. Take the stock bumper off:

There are four main bolts and a handful of screws that need to be taken out. Take your time doing this, and make sure you don't rip anything out. If you want to sale your stock bumper, you'll want to keep all the stock hardware and make sure not to strip any of the screws or scratch the bumper while taking it off. It took me about half an hour to get the stock bumper off.



Step three. Time to do some grinding:

You're going to need to grind off half of the tab that is shown in the picture. After that you'll want to put the bumper in place and mark the metal just above the tab you just trimmed, because you're going to have to grind out a little notch for the winch plate (you can see in the final picture, esp. if you click here and see the high res picture).

This is what you grind:



And this is how you grind it:



Step four. A little more grinding:

There is a low hanging bracket that you can optionally (although I recommend it) trim. I trimmed them so that they would be higher than the bar on the bumper. I trimmed them instead of removing them completely because they hold the fender to the grill and I didn't want this to be come a weak point in the fender area.



Step five. Attach bumper and enjoy:

Putting the bumper on wasn't totally painless. We had to wiggle and push and pull to get the bolts to go through and I ended up using a little bit smaller bolt than was supplied, because the holes were off ever so slightly. Here are a few pictures of the finished product: