Help Installing Bull Guard (with LED strip) - 2013 Tacoma

So I've been super thankful to this community for recently helping me to install some new electrical devices I've been putting into my Tacoma. I was initially planning to have most of this work done in a shop, but am finding that with a little help from here, it's actually pretty fun to do it. So thanks for that!

So I had purchased a Bull Guard with an LED Light Strip on it from Amazon. It's gotten pretty good reviews and it seems easy enough to install.

Tonight I lined up all of the parts into numbered baggies and then placed one of the steel locking frames over the bolts just to make sure everything lined up. It seemed to look exactly like the installation diagram in the instructions. So I had everything setup and then the first step is to remove two of the nuts that are basically holding the front bumper onto the car. Those bolts are used to hold part of the steel locking frame into place.

Only when I put the wrench on the nuts, it looks like they're actually welded on? I couldn't get enough torque on them to move them and then when I looked closer, it really appears that there is absolutely no space between the nut and the frame below. It was getting dark out so I figured I would wrap up for tonight and get back on it tomorrow, but does this seem right to people? Would those nuts be welded onto the steel below them instead of just being tightened like a normal nut/bolt?

I sprayed some PB Blaster on them in hopes that it would loosen them up, but still no dice. So before I go nuts stripping it down, is it possible they're actually welded on?

Note that in my attachments, the red arrow are the bolts I'm trying to remove and what the steel locking frame for the bull guard is supposed to attach to. The blue area is where the a spacing washer goes (over the hole) and then a 120mm bolt goes through it. I've confirmed all of these fit into the space properly.

 

So I thought that I would go ahead and followup to my own post for anyone who is working on a similar project. It turned out that the factory bolts were NOT welded or otherwise fixed to the main steel, but rather just that they were locked on super, super tightly. I unleashed quite a bit of PB Blaster on them and then used a much longer socket wrench to get some significant torque. They eventually loosened and came off.

All in all it wasn't that difficult of a project. I'd found some videos online of companies who sell these Bull Bars for the Tacoma. None of them were for the specific brand that I got, but they were all pretty much the same thing.

The one I got was from Autosaver. It looked nice, was rated well, and was pretty inexpensive. Plus is came pre-installed with the LED light bar across the front center which I really liked.

Anyway, a couple of points I would note about doing this.

1. It's really challenging doing the job yourself. I'll expound on that in a moment, but it really would be better to have two people work on this together so that one can hold the bar into place while the other person fastens everything. In the end I managed to do it solo, but a helper would have been nice. You can see how I just have it sitting there before I started affixing the bolts and then slowly started adjusting it.



2. I'm sure all of the attachment frames are a little different, but the Autosaver one was particularly difficult to work with. It has to be affixed to the stock bolts for the front bumper. This is all fine and good, but the steel add-on frame create a very tiny space in which to work (as illustrated in one of the pictures). This means that you can only turn the socket about 1-2 inches at a time. I counted about 120 turns of the socket to get the stock bolts off and it was extremely difficult to get the torque I really needed. Still, with some patience I managed.



3. There are a lot of moving pieces. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that it allows you to really adjust the position of everything to precisely what you need. I get why they did this. The bad is that because there are so many adjustable pieces, you really have to work hard to get everything centered and equidistant from both sides. This was the part that was especially difficult solo. I had to contort myself into a number of flexible positions to hold thing into place while I tightened it all. So in my opinion, it would be a little nicer if the bull bar attachments pieces were welded to the bull bar itself and then just the part that physically connects to the front steel could be adjusted. I'm not sure if they make one like that, but it would have made the process a lot simpler.

Anyway, in the end it came out nicely. It's extremely well-fastened, seems super durable, and looks pretty nice. I haven't hooked up the electronics yet since I'm still waiting on some custom switches to arrive, but I'll post some pictures of that process when I get to it.

Here's the final view of it: