Rugged Ridge Front Bumper

[The Last Cowboy]

I used to work for an aftermarket bumper manufacturer. We used powder coat on the products, but touched up with paint, mostly Rustoleum.

Scrape any loose flakes away. Sand the bare/rusted area and feather into the powder coat. Paint the sanded are with high build primer, then sand it smooth with the surrounding coating. This is easy, and you wont need to do it to anywhere near the level of detail that you would if you were painting a body panel. Next, you don't need to prime the power coat, as it will already serve as a primer, but for best results, prime the entire bumper. After you prime, wet the bumper and use an extra fine, wet 3M pad all over it. Then rinse again, let it dry, use compressed air to blow it off. As stated above, the Rustoleum bed liner paint makes for a great, textured, easy to touch up or repair, finish. If you don't want texture, use regular Rustoleum.

If you want to use a base coat/clear coat automotive paint, you will need to wet sand it to a finer finish, then use a tack cloth prior to painting. A paint booth and HVLP paint gun would be highly recommended.

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[The Last Cowboy]

BTW, powder coat has it's place. However, most manufacturers use it on bumper because it's cheaper and more time effective for them. Paint is the way to go. Imron is the best finish I've seen for bumpers, but it's expensive and requires skill to apply. One one of our competitors used it, and it's excellent.

On bumpers, paint or liner coating is the way to go. Most Chinese made bumpers will not have a well prepped surface (sand blasted to clean, white metal). The coatings used will be bottom end quality. I've seen it time and again on new bumpers that gray and rust along welds and creases within months. Some don't even use powder coat or paint. They use E coating, which is even cheaper. It makes an excellent primer, but is not really good for weather exposure. E coated bumpers will usually surface rust almost immediately when exposed to weather.

Some of those low cost bumpers are built decent, but you need to know what you're looking at. If you buy a bumper that is imported and is cheap, you should consider painting it before you even install it.

 

[brotherGood]

Circling back to this..

Shoutout Harbor Freight for the 12k winch on sale..now that is taken care of. My goal is to take the bumper off next weekend, refinish it, then install the winch and reinstall the bumper at once. As far as how to refinish the bumper, the spray-on bedliner seems to be the winner over just standard paint. Are they all pretty much the same with regard to color and texture being out of a rattle can?

 

[ScotM]

I used the rustoleum pro grade. Worked great.

 

[brotherGood]

Well, we decided to tackle this today. The wife wanted to do the work since its her Jeep (who am I to complain?) but naturally I didn't get hardly any pictures. The bumper was in worse shape than I thought..but after a bit of sanding and a few coats of the Rustoleum bedliner spray, it came out looking pretty respectable.

The winch install was a bit of a bear though. The instructions werent all that great, so I had the winch on and off a couple times. Once I finally got it to where I could install the control box, I realized there was no room for the wiring. A bit of digging led me to the idea of rerouting the wiring out to the side..so once the wife got back home I let her make the call and thats what we did.

The other issue I had was mounting the power disconnect. I thought I found a decent place, once again thanks to some forum digging, but then realized the supplied cable was too short. Here's where/how I settled on it so far.

So, Ive got a couple things still to finish up (better mounting the disconnect, and installing a grommet for the wires) but overall it turned out okay. Much better than it had been. Like I said, I didnt really get pictures..but she did take a before/after for the Jeeps Instagram.

 

[brotherGood]

Went and grabbed a picture this morning as we were headed out..

 

[brotherGood]

..and with the grommet installed. I ordered the wrong size, but amidst fighting it..I think i probably should've cut the hole a bit bigger.

 

[Flip]

..and with the grommet installed. I ordered the wrong size, but amidst fighting it..I think i probably should've cut the hole a bit bigger.

Nice job, very innovative.

I was able to tuck the wiring at the back of the winch & grill. It's tight, to remove the grill I would have to remove the winch. I had my switch mounted in 2 different locations. I didn't have an issues. Maybe HF shortened the wire, that wouldn't surprise me.

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