Figured I'd make a post in here about my bumper.
Buckstop Truckware is located a few minutes south of Portland, Oregon. They build heavy duty winch bumpers that are 1/4" steel construction in the impact zone and 3/16" steel on the top. They are not the least expensive option for mounting a winch, but they are beefy bumpers. They offer the classic, baja and outback style bumpers. The bumper remains the same throughout the styles, the grille guard is what changes, which for the record is removable if you ever needed to service the rads or something and needed front access without removing the entire bumper.
Buckstop has super cheap shipping, flat rate of $75 anywhere in the US. They also have great deals on winches and lights as a package deal with the bumper.
I purchased a Outback Buckstop with Black Hammertone powder coating (acid washed first!). An additional pair of 6" light buckets (base model only comes with 1 pair of buckets. A WARN Industries 16.5ti Winch, and Hella 500 driving & fog lights.
Portland isn't very far from where I used to live up near Seattle so I just took the 6 hour drive down to pick it up myself, a road trip never hurt anyone. I also went down there because I was moving here to Wyoming within about a week and didn't want to rely on the freight company to deliver it in a timely manner.
Step one was to fuel the girl up for a road trip...
Step two was to make it through portland traffic.
Finally we made it and got it loaded up!
Having a forklift made it easy to load. Now how the heck do we get it out of the bed. Keep in mind it weighs about 250 pounds.
You can see here that the grille guard bolts onto the bumper using supplied hardware.
Bolted the grille guard up.
Opened up the box from WARN, which itself weighs about 130 pounds.
One beast bolted up to another
Yanked my old bumper off
Prepped again to be lifted up to bolt to the truck
It worked.. Kinda
She's bolted up, only a few things left
Threw the lights on and called it a day.
Wired everything up the next day. I hate wires so look away now if you like clean looking wiring.
Those switches sure do look nice next to that knob.
Lights working
Two days later I made the 19 hour trip out here to Laramie.
Couldn't be happier with the way it turned out.