What year Discovery do you have, drowssap?

 

A 2000

 

Here is my wrap up post about getting the bumper mounted. Still to come is getting the grill trimmed to fit with the bumper and cut to accommodate the winch.

It became apparent that to mount the bumper I would need to remove the triangular parts of the bumper mount that were supposed to slide on top of the frame diagonals (circled in the picture below). I found someone on Dweb who’d done that. You can see in another photo that there was no way the bolt holes would have lined up correctly otherwise.

The smarter choice at that point would probably have been to return the bumper but I forged ahead. Had I returned it I would still have needed to decide on and order an alternative. I was not going to put the ARB back on and the truck had already been out of commission for a week.

Once the sparks flew and the angle grinder cut-off wheel finished its work (see video) vertical alignment was no longer a problem but horizontal alignment was. To address that I had to grind down the corner and face of the vertical diagonal part where it abuts the front face of the frame diagonal (see pic). I wasn’t worried about doing that because those parts of the mount no longer served any useful purpose once the upper triangular parts were gone. I wish I had taken more pictures of the process but at by Sunday afternoon I just wanted to be done with the job.

That took some trial and error, and the bumper went on and off the truck three or four times. That was fun. I would hold it in place while my son inserted smaller diameter, 3/8” bolts into the upper holes to hold the bumper in place. Once the bumper was in that position I could move it around and try other more appropriately sized bolts. The bumper came with 10mm bolts but they seemed sloppy in the ½ inch holes. At one point I was going to settle for 7/16 bolts, which are slightly larger than 10mm, but I pressed ahead and eventually got ½ inch bolts into the upper holes. The ½ inch bolts hold the bumper in its most upright position, but I did settle for 7/16ths in the lower holes. Once the grinding was done I primed all the bare metal areas and then sprayed them with 3-4 coats of Rustoleum. I wish I had taken more pictures along the way but by Sunday afternoon I just wanted to be done.

If after reading this you decide you’d still like to buy a TF I recommend that you get the seller to open the big corrugated box it comes in and take careful measurements of the distance between the bottom surface of the triangular piece and the top of the upper mounting holes, plus the distance from the corner of the vertical diagonal part that I had to grind to the upper and lower mounting holes. Some people buy the TFs and have no problem mounting them and others have trouble like I did. Seems that quality control at TF is a problem. Problems like I had are unacceptable from any manufacturer, but even more so from a company that promotes itself like Terrafirma does.

 

Company Info
Allmakes seems to have a reputation of being inconsistent in quality.

 

Now on to trimming the grill. I’ve been thinking about using a grill from an ’03 or ’04 instead since they do not need to be trimmed. There’s one at a local boneyard that I could get for $50. I drove to the boneyard to try out the fit of the '04 grill and it would drop right in but then I’d need to fabricate some other way to mount the inboard ends of the headlight finishers. Perhaps a small L-bracket somehow glued or cemented so that it could be attached to the metal bracket to which the existing grill is attached would work. Trimming my existing grill would mean losing the little finger-shaped tabs on the bottom of the grill as part of the support for it. It would be held in place by the three scrivets across the top plus one screw at each end.

I pulled both headlights to have better access, plus I removed the plastic shield that was mounted vertically next to the the RH headlight. I have no idea what its purpose is. It was riveted in place. If I reinstall it I’ll just use a couple sheet metal screws to replace the rivets I drilled out. (I later found that there was a shield on the LH side too, but it was broken off years ago apparently.)

With the headlights and the plastic shield out of the way I was able to position the grill on top of the bumper. The mounting screw is 5/8" above the center of its mounting hole, as pictured.. If I trim off exactly 3/4" there will be a gap of about 1/8” between the top of the bumper and the bottom of the grill. That seems about right. There would be about a 1/4" of material left to support the bottom of the U-shaped channel into which the headlight finisher is mounted. The cut line would be along the bottom edge of the blue tape in the last pic.

Another question is what tool to use to cut the grill. A lot of guys have said they used a Dremel but one idea offered is to use a table saw with the blade reversed. I just happen to have a table saw and I think using it might make it easier to get a nice, straight cut if I can figure out how to support the grill and keep it aligned to the saw fence. I’ll stop by Lowe’s and see if they have some more appropriate blade for cutting plastic that will work on the table saw.

 

It looks like That bumper is mounted too high. I mounted mine almost flush with the headlight trim and I had to trim only the edge of the grill off.

 

Exactly.

The holes were cut too low on the mount so the bumper sits too high. It's a big whiff on the part of Terrafirma. And mine is at least a good 1/4" lower than it would have been had I not cut off the triangular plates.

I got in touch again with the guy on Dweb who also had to cut off the triangular plates and asked him to send a picture of his grill (attached). You can see his trimming was minimal compared to what I would need to do.

I think I'm going to go back to the option of using the '04 grill I wrote about earlier and just figure out a solution to anchor the inboard ends of the headlight finishers.

Or maybe I'll still just send it back to Lucky 8 and let them pay the freight. Paying with a credit card gives us certain rights and advantages, and leverage.

 

Glad to hear

The issues you are having may be A side effect of the accident you were in that bent your ARB bumper. If the collision was strong enough to bend the bumper and the bumper support perhaps it twisted your frame a little bit..

 

Just curious, when you took measurements of your frame how did they compare to other D2's?

 

I don't have any relevant measurements of other DIIs to compare. The dimensions in RAVE don't appear detailed enough to be useful in this case.