1997 Ford Desert Chase Truck Bumper Build

This is my Cheap Chase Truck build. I bought this truck at the auction for $1300 a few years ago and upgraded it to use for pit support and chase duties for off road desert racing in Nevada, California and Baja California. The truck also works well for camping and home improvement projects.

This is an over view of the front winch bumper I built using a Torchmate 2x4 Growth Series table with my Son.

 

The Front Clip of the truck was damaged when I bought it so I replaced all the sheet metal with Fiberglass designed for off road racing. This allowed the installation of larger tires without a lift kit. The front bumper has been removed so we can start the design process.

 

Since my CAD skills don't allow for modeling a full truck, I decided to use foam board available at my local office supply to build a full size model of the bumper. This would allow me to install the model and see if I liked the way it fit and looked on the truck.



Duct Tape helped me hold it all together, as well as a few pieces of scrap metal.

 

Using foam board gave me a lot of flexibility in my design.

 

Here you can see the basic design coming together.

 

I wanted the top to follow the contour of the body. To match the shape I set up a number of reference points with my straight edge. This would allow me to transfer the shape to both sides evenly. I used a home made angle finder to verify I had both sides even, and a smaller speed square as a method to transfer my data points.

 

This flexible drafting tool holds its shape so that I can transfer the contour over to the foam board.




Now I just need to transfer the shape to my foam board


I cut this out with an razor blade and test fit the piece.

 

I made a reflection of the first piece for the other side to finish off my top plate.


Now you can see my bumper start coming together.







Because I only have a 2x4 table I had to keep in mind my cutting table limits. I would have liked to cut this out of a single sheet, but I decided it was easier for me to weld the seem than to index my cut on the machine.

 

Now that I have my design established I turned my 3D model into a 2D flat panel to design my CAD drawings.

 

I designed the shapes in Torchmate CAD, but I could also have taken pictures and imported the files. It was pretty short work to use my model as a template to create my CAD files. Since I had reference points on my angles I was able to just transfer my shape by hand.

 

Once I had the steel version of my bumper built I could focus on the mounting points, which I also modeled in foam board.

 

Test fit of the center section of the bumper.

 

I used the truck as my jig to build the bumper in place, this way I would not have to worry about my mounting holes missing the mark. I finish welded with the bumper on a work bench.

 

After a lot of work with the grinder and multiple sanders, I finally finished up my bumper and installed the winch. I bent a piece of DOM tube to finish it off. The two tow points in the front bumper tie directly into the frame.

 

The 10,000 pound winch fits nicely down inside the bumper. The only way it can be stolen would be to remove the entire bumper. The winch has been used many times in the last 5 years with no damage to the bumper. or the truck. The 10,000 pound rating is a little light for the truck, but in cases where I need more power I use a snatch block and rig the winch to increase my pulling power.