What front tow hook brackets are you using.

Installed the ARB Rear Recovery Hooks. Instructions came with hooks, attached. Interesting that the truck 3D model has "ARB" logo on the rear bumper.

10lb 14" x 4" x 3/4" Steel (each hook)

0.6lb M16 x 130mm Bolt + Nut <unknown material> (each bolt)

Bolt / nuts are the weight and color of aluminum, but are indeed magnetic. They have the same one-line head as the front hooks. DP can for size.


Hook holes must have welded inserts to be compatible. Do not need to remove the center hole cap.



Installed

 

I've got a 2 inch receiver hitch at both ends

It makes sense to me to spread the load across both sides of any frame.

 

ARB's stuff is all legit. They engineer everything with, you know, real engineers, and test / rate their recovery gear with published working load limits, etc.

If there isn't an ARB front recovery point yet for the 4th gen, wait until there is one.

Here's what the 2nd/3rd gen one looks like. It's around 20 lbs of massive beef metal and it is RATED for 17,600 (seventeen thousand) pounds when pulled from any angle within the left/right sweep of the front tires.

The point of having a recovery point rated that high is two-fold:
1) You don't have to think about whether it, or the vehicle frame, is going to bend in any recovery scenario.

2) It'll also easily handle whatever dynamic loads may occur during snatching and/or if the truck gets momentarily stuck on an obstacle of some kind like a rock or stump etc.

There are 3 bolts visible, and 2 more besides (not visible in this photo). It makes a massively strong/stiff L-shape. Only downside is this old 2nd/3rd gen version (released about a decade ago) does not have radiused inner corners on the shackle hole so it is not directly usable with soft recovery shackles etc. Needs a D-ring, but that's OK, proper D-rings are megastrong.

https://store.arbusa.com/recovery-point-2823010/

 

I wondered why there was no ARB front recovery point on the Toyota parts site. Have been trying to decide if I should get one of the available aftermarket points to make anyone trying to pull me feel better. The stock ones look plenty strong enough to rip the frame plate off where they're bolted on.

 

IDK for-certain about the 4th gen, but on earlier gens those u-shaped or hook-shaped points at the front are not intended as recovery or towing points. AFAIK they are merely tie-down points for securing the vehicle during shipping, i.e. on a cargo ship and/or an auto-carrier tractor-trailer.

 

But ARB doesn't have anything for the 2024 Tacoma.

 

Exactly.

 

As I said in my previous post --

"If there isn't an ARB front recovery point yet for the 4th gen, wait until there is one."

 

I'm thinking that welding is going to be the only serious answer for this. Those two bolts and the frame appendage are just not ever going to be enough meat for the kind of force that the pictured 2nd gen ARB bracket will handle.

A suggestion - replace the flange screws with hardened capscrews and hardened flat washers (not stamped or crowned). Metric 10.9's are about all the nuts will handle - but get all of the grip you can. Flange screws often give false torque indications due to drag. Buy these hex head screws from John Deere, Komatsu or CAT - not some "will fit" hardware supplier - get them from an organization that has real world quality controls. CAT has a catalog called "One Safe Source" and I've used it in several places around the world to get the right stuff by part number.

Fully weld the boxes to close all of the holes and bend relief cracks. The photo shows something that could be rated for a shipping anchor - not an impact worthy frame mount. It needs to be completed. Use a wire brush or sanding disc to be sure that paint, rust and dirt don't contaminate the welding - shiny metal is the answer. You may have to remove the hoop bracket to complete this - be sure the clamping surface is left clean and flat for final assembly. Prime and paint the welds.

After the final assembly - find a hole and squirt the interior with cosmoline or some similar rust prevention material. You don't want the box and hardware degrading in the future with no way to check it. In my world (mining machines) we would place a tack weld on the back of the bracket and inspect it after use (or before) to be sure nothing has moved.

When you use these anchors - use two, both sides need hitched - easy to double up.

I'm positive this writ can be refined - but this would be a start.....

 

WAT?!

Or, just contact ARB's customer support/sales team and inquire whether they plan to release a 4th gen front recovery point sometime in the next 6-24 months.

The whole point of the size/shape + 5 bolts of the 2nd gen ARB front recovery hardware is that it accomplishes strength through size/thickness/geometry, rather than having to permanently modify the frame w/ welding.

 

I wouldn't call completing the crummy factory welds on that appendage a "modification".......... I've found all sorts of half-assed assembly and welding in my truck - just needed reasonable completion. Will still work as Toyota intended - just a bit more finished.

 

In the entire history of the Tacoma, I've never heard of someone breaking a factory recovery point. If they did, they were using a frigging chain, and not using a kinetic rope.

 

It is not a "factory recovery point." It is a tow hook and/or transport loop. Yes, the Toyota user manual says it can be used to tow a Taco, specifically on flat, level, dry hard surfaced roads, but it has no published load rating.

While "recovery point" is not a technical or legal term, as a rule what distinguishes a recovery points from a "hook," "tow hook," or "transport loop" (which are the terms Toyota uses for the various kinds installed on different trim & model year Tacos) is published load ratings from the manufacturer. Toyota does not publish any load ratings for any version of these parts, as far as I know.

There have been a lot of other threads on this topic (Tacoma tow points / tow hooks) over the years, with similar amounts of confusion & misinformation, using the wrong terminology, etc.

I'm not here to change minds -- your mind, or anyone else's -- on whether the factory tow hooks/transport loops are up to the task of a deep mud or sharp-angle recovery. I'm just calling it out so that any readers who happen upon this thread & are truly interested to figure out what the front end of a Taco can handle when being yanked on, hard, by a winch or snatch strap, in various diff. situations and with different types of front-end hardware attached -- can separate misleading information or suggestion from actual load ratings.

Also, anyone considering after-market so-called "recovery points" which aren't actually engineered or tested as such, be careful, there's plenty of Amazon gear and even stuff from reputable-looking 3rd party fabricators which claims to be rated, but isn't.

Additional info here:
https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/arb-recovery-point-alternative.755449/#post-28275147

 

Here's a visual comparison between the ARB 8.5-ton rated recovery point and Toyota's heaviest-duty factory front tow point, as shipped on 2nd and 3rd gen TRD-OR trims.

Can you yank on the factory Toyota heavy-duty tow hook? Sure you can.
How hard can you yank? I don't know. Toyota certainly knows but isn't telling.
Good luck & use good judgment when trying to yank on it.

The issue isn't the construction of the hook itself, the body of which looks to be at least 1" in diameter and forged steel. That's great. The hook alone, in a test rig, probably wouldn't break until somewhere past 15K lbs.

The problem is in how that hook transmits pulling forces to the frame, through only 2 bolts in a single plane in a small area.

By comparison the 17-pound ARB contraption uses 5 bolts spread out over multiple planes and a much larger total area.

(Pic borrowed from someone else's post on TW forums.)

 

Can you get a soft shackle in them?

 

I'm just going to call out this "NYTOP Front Tow/Recovery Point" as another ridiculous product. This piece of machined steel probably costs less than $10 a pop to make and it has no more strength than the standard Toyota TRD-OR tow hook. They can rate it for whatever they want -- 9K, 11K pounds, it varies depending on the website -- but it's just 2 bolts in a single plane, the same as the Toyota TRD-OR tow hook. In a test rig, the piece of steel itself may easily handle the 10K+ pounds, but the 2 bolts & frame where it attaches probably wont.

$260? I hope that's for a pair of these. Regardless of whether it's a pair or not, the actual ARB 2nd gen recovery point only costs a bit more, at $310 for an engineered product that is going not going to warp or bed a front frame rail in actual use. (2nd/3rd gen version. Obviously ARB hasn't released a 4th gen version yet.)

For a mall crawler with money to set on fire, who cares, throw these on the truck and look rad.

If you may ever actually need to attempt a recovery from vehicle front, as with the Toyota factory TOW HOOK, good luck.

 

Interesting / strange that these ARB-produced 2024 Tacoma rear tow hooks are called "tow hooks" (not recovery points) by Toyota and there is no published load rating for them. Also interesting that they don't appear on ARB's main web site under "recovery points." Leads me to believe they may be more of the usual TRD decorative swag stuff.

For anyone who says "yeah but bro if you have 2 of them you can use a bridle!" Sure, I guess you could, buy why would you bother with the extra complexity & failure points when you could just use the receiver hitch as a recovery point?

FWIW you are going to get a FAR greater load rating & safe pulling capacity by just installing a D-ring attachment point like the Factor 55 HitchLink 2.0 into the stock 2" receiver hitch. The only benefit to the ARB rear tow hooks on the 2024 Taco would be for "positioning," i.e. using multiple cables to pull in different directions at once. For difficult angled/sideways sloped recoveries.

The stock Tacoma 2nd gen receiver hitch (at least on 6-lugger) is actually rated as DOT CLASS IV, which is good for 10,000K of usable strength. I'm sure the 4th gen stock receiver hitch is also a Class IV, though I haven't seen one up close. That far exceeds the Tacoma's ~6500 lb rated tow capacity. Toyota had to bump the receiver hitch design to a full Class IV because DOT Class III is only good for 5,000 lbs. A Class IV hitch with a published spec of 10,000 lbs has a breaking strength closer to 25,000 lbs.

I'm sure the reason ARB doesn't make any proper rated "recovery points" for the back end of Tacomas is that there's no way to make anything that is stronger than the stock receiver hitch that comes with the truck.

 

While I agree that toyota's and maybe many of these aftermarket "hooks" may not the THE best way to "recover" a vehicle, they DO work. There are MANY MANY of us who have had to be pulled up for one reason or another (usually in steep hills or over some obstacle) and when you're not like one of the people here who are obviously very well versed in recovery, how do you do it? ... the recovery points, and for the most part, THEY WORK, people use them and people get recovered. People use these hooks, and we don't seem them breaking all the time.



There will always be a truck that is door-deep in mud that will be impossible to pull out but for most of what most of us do, I believe these hooks still have a valid use. Especially the red tow hooks, those are obviously better, they are usually 100X stronger than black (even ARB knows that and that's why they made theirs red) and I believe (don't quote me) coefficient of drag also decreases by 12-13%. (seriously don't quote me on that) (I mean it...)

 

Yeh I agree that empirically, the stock tow hooks and a good bit of aftermarket kit tends to work fine because the average recovery is a few thousand pounds, maybe even 4 or 5 thousand pounds of pull, not 9K or 11K. The outlier cases would be for massively overweight 7,000 lb Tacomas that need yanking out of deep mud or recovering up a steep slope or other highly resistant obstacle. At the outer edge of the bell curve, 2 std deviations (or more) above the mean, then rated recovery gear starts to matter a bit more.

Point also taken that red color increases strength by 100x, plus 13% more aero.