Offroading w/o hitch receiver?

How bad is it to offroad without a hitch receiver (as in if I remove the stock towing hitch)? Will the flex damage the frame? I'd assume the rest of the cross-members along the ladder frame will be enough to keep things together. The reason is primarily for clearance concerns.

 

Come on man you have a souped up tundra and you're asking this? I know it's 1am but I didn't think people drank that much on a Monday night.

I'd be more worried about off roading with a hitch receiver. I can't tell you how many times I got caught up on the hitch going up/down steep grades. But no nothing's going to happen.

 

No don't worry about it. Your frame has other cross members. If you remove a hitch I would suggest making sure you have a good recovery point though, mine doesn't have a good rear recovery point right now because of this.

 

Haha, I just wanted to be 100% sure. I currently have a skid attached to my hitch receiver that has been working great; it's quarter-inch steel and I still managed to bend a corner a bit. My main reason I'm asking is because I'm thinking of cutting up my stock hitch receiver for both clearance in preparation for Moab in a few weeks and because eventually I'm going to have someone make a customer bumper welded to it that would get rid of the middle hanging part anyway. Below are the cuts I plan on making (the red lines). The green lines follow the thick tube that connects each side of the receiver and houses the receiver itself. The blue lines are a would-be platea of the top portion of the future bumper.

Yea, I figured as such; I just wanted to be 100% sure I wasn't going to damage anything by maxing out my flex in Moab. As for recovery, I think until I get a custom bumper, I'll just pull from the frame.

 

I would not push the truck hard without some sort of bracing across the frame aft of your rear shackle hanger.

The stock "x" frame brace (spare tire mount, if your frame is anything like ours) is meant to support a daily driven truck that sees some light fire roads. It is not meant for a truck that's flexing out, hitting bump hard, etc.

Just my $0.02. There's no right answer here, besides "depends".