Weld on shackle mounts

One of my biggest gripes about my ARB bumper is having no shackle mounts on it. Has anyone welded shackle mounts on an ARB or any other steel bumper?

 

Pretty much every one that has ever built a bumper has.

If you do weld some on look for weld through shackle mounts. To mount properly the mount should key into a hole/slot in the bumper and then be welded from both sides. There are a lot of sketchy jobs out there with shackle mounts just welded to the outer skin of the bumper.

 

I have an ARB and had to build my own brackets to adapt it to my truck, I was originally going to do slots and push through pad eyes for recovery points but ended up notching my front frame and welding in a modified factory tow bar so now I have a reinforced frame and a 2" receiver hitch I use as my front recovery point.

I know there's bolt on receiver hitches you could probably make work similarly I'd trust that over anything surface stitched to the ARB.

While the bumpers aren't made of typical A36 mild steel and are infact much tougher stuff they're still too thin to be welding on and then snatching off of IMHO.

 

I made a receiver hitch for my old style Smitty Built bumper.

One way to find out do a tensile test . The bumper would deform before the weld fails.

I don`t really think welding inside and out without a large reinforcement on the inside would get you all that much more strength .

It would be the side pulls that would be the real test.That no matter what seem to happen far to often.