A REAL Bumper (come at me, Bro!)

My first-gen had taken one too many hits to the rear; after ordering and sending back 2 aftermarket bumpers (junk), and failing to find an acceptable salvage, I got to fab'n.

A brief backstory: the twice-daily dog walk has often found us walking a community sports field. As it would happen, among other games, folks practice lacrosse there; a little hunting frequently offered up lacrosse balls lost in the tall grass. These things are like the biggest rubber bouncy-ball of all time- and for the little kid in me, found treasure. On good days, I'd leave the field with pockets bulging; on bad, the mowers would confetti the balls before I could get to them. Once home, balls joined their kin. My spouse, resenting the drawers being colonized by white rubber orbs, would ask, without hope, what my "plans" were for the balls (as though treasure required a plan).

Here's the intersection of these needs/narratives: the Lacrosse Bumper. Started with some 5" square tube, a bit of plate, channel, and bar, followed by a lot of hacking, grinding, and stick welding:



Notice the holes. Those will be matched to a rough plank of hickory, butchered to shape. Next comes a jig for cutting lacrosse balls in half, then another for boring centered holes to receive some heavily galvanized hex bolts, and we have this:



Fastened to the steel portion, the assembly:



Looking down at the array of half-balls, we can see how the bumper works:



Impacts to the hickory plank will compress the lacrosse balls, the bolts free to move within the steel bumper. Here's a view with the hitch installed:



Minus the tow ball drop, about 70 lbs heavier than the stock bumper. I reckoned folks would take one look at the metal-studded slab of wood and want nothing to do with it. I dig the early-automobile esthetic and sensibility it brings, hearkening back to a time when wood and springs actually acted as bumpers, instead of crumple zones.

A last few looks:

 

Wait, that monstrosity and a trailer would only be attached by two bolts to your truck?

 

Ugliest thing ive ever seen

 

Please don’t tow with that. It’s unsafe at best.

 

friday came early??

 

Excellent use of an abundance of balls. If nothing more your Tacoma is one of a kind!

 

Build a front one now

 

Your mo..... Nah. I'll let it marinate for a bit.

 

@jimtoyota

Spit up some beer just now...

Aesthetics is unusual...but it is "Art" to a certain extent.

 

I don't know where you get that impression- the bumper employs standard brackets. Surely you will be alarmed to hear the tow hitch is only connected by one bolt.

 

Even with all those bolts and half-cut balls, I can't get passed those welds

 

A shear pin designed to take a lot of weight vs a couple of twisty boys...
I'm just gonna give you the benefit of doubt and pray there's actually 4 bolts. Still, I wouldn't tow anything but a very light load. That's a lot of weight on two thin pieces of what looks to be freshly welded on frame horns.

 

You still have a crumple zone. It will just have splinters and ball fragments in it.

Like fancy off road bumpers, it will withstand impacts better than the OE bit to a certain point (currently unknown), but when that point is crossed, things get much worse.

Now, the real question is....... is the wife happy you've removed your used balls from her drawers?

 

The crumple is still those spindly sticks of a frame it's attached to.

 

Shin-grater. Next season, as the wood starts to age, thats when the fun will really start.

 

1) Your "doubt" about the number of bolts was just something you made up to say something nasty- there was zero basis.
2) This isn't a tomato- the "freshness" of a weld is a meaningless metric.
3) Those "frame horns" (bumper brackets) are OEM spec, and are welded to nothing, secured, as usual, by bolts, and are a shared part to other higher-capacity first-gen models- that is, even with the added bumper weight, still less than the max load-combined tongue weight the part was designed for.

Cosmetic insight and faulty presumption.

 

I wanted to practice stick welding, rather than the familiar MIG or TIG, employing more-or-less exclusively deep-cutting 6011 (typo: should read "7011"). It would have been easier to produce a cosmetically more attractive bead with another stick, but without the assurance of penetration and at lower challenge level, and with less control development. If my goals were otherwise, I would have employed a MIG. So few sweet stack-of-dimes welds on this part, and nothing that mattered depleted by grinding.