I have been researching this on and off in the past 2 to 3 months but with Rod's awesome bodylift kit that he is developing nearing completion, I have gotten my backside in gear and will document for you all that are interested what I have in mind in regards to raising the ARB bar to suit the 2" bodylift.
This thread will be only about the raising of the ARB bar (unless someone buys it off me in the meantime and I get a tube one
), not the bodylift itself, I'll leave that to another thread another day.To begin with lets have a look at the front of the current generation Hilux and the chassis mounting points where the ARB bar bolts onto -
You can see the areas that I have circled in RED as the points on either side that the ARB bar is fixed to.
I have thought long and hard about how I'm going to make a bracket to fix onto the chassis and accomadate the design of the bar mount itself. There was alot of brainstorming with Rod for back up advice about where to raise the actual bar........one option was to raise it infront of the crush tube mounts which is doable but would leave the mounts themselves very exposed both visually and physically and I wouldn't be gaining any approach angle from this method. Another option was to cut the crush tube and weld it onto a plate in between 2 inches higher but this seemed abit too dodgy for my liking and I settled on the third option which is a "sandwich plate" design that will bolt onto the chassis mount on the bottom and have holes in a plate above it to accomadate the ARB Bar mounts.
Enough of all this theoretical talk, you guys wanna see pictures of whats going on here right?
To begin with, we will need to cut out a small portion of the ARB bar either side below the mounts to allow the bar to slide upwards. The portion to be cut off is only as wide as the chassis mount itself and limits this movement upwards because it is horizontal on the bar, you can see this portion highlighted in GREEN below -
Next up is a design I worked out to help me understand how I was going to do this.....below, on the left is the chassis mount, centre is the ARB Bar mount (looking from the front of the vehicle) and on the far right is the combination of the two that I will make-
I then requested off this forum for some assiatcne which was very kindly accepted by saum14 from Tazzy, for someone that is about to fit a bullbar if they could trace out one of these mounts for me and mail it to me so I have a 100% to scale copy on paper to work with.
Well, here below is what Saum sent to me -
And I then went about making a copy and placing one above the other 50mm apart. This will show me where the boltholes and studs will go from both the chassis rail and the ARB Bar mount. I then traced an outline around both and began analysing what more I would need to do.....I came up with the design below -
Now I'll try to explain it abit because it can be difficult getting your head around how this will mount up.
The adaptor plate will follow the outline of the design above and all the holes you see in it will need to be drilled into it. I have added the dotted blue line just as a reference so you can see what I did and how.
The 2 Yellow holes are where the studs poke through from the factory Chassis mount.
The bottom left hand hole is the factory chassis mount hole
The Red hole is the top left hand hole of the factory chassis mount. This one will need to be drilled through the ARB bar when fitted to assist in holding the arb bar mount onto this plate.
The 2 top left hand holes and the top right hand hole are the standard holes of the arb bar mount.
The only slight problem I will have is the hole above the left hand Yellow stud which is the lower left hand arb bar mount hole.
I "could" probably skip this last one, but to do it properly I would need to use a counter sunk head bolt so that I can tighten the nut of the left hand stud ontop of it since they end up being so close.
Guys,
I am open to your opinions, questions, criticism both constructive and not here.
I would like to hear your opinions on this, I would like to know whether you guys think I should use/make the hole for the lower left ARB mount wwhich is the one just above the left hand stud, and the other question is should I use 10mm or 8mm thick plate to make this?
One negative to this design is the fact that once fitted, the ARB bar will be sitting forward 8 or 100mm further whatever the thickness of this plate will be. There is enough thread on the studs to use a 10mm plate, but moving the bar 10mm forward is not big deal since it does sit a little below the grilled and the garnish under the headlights has a little bit of room for adjustment, so you will barely be able to tell.
EDIT:
I have made a slight revision to the original design above.....the hole above the left hand yellow stud I have decided not to use, it wont be needed. The sandwich plate will be mounted to the four original points of the chassis mount (Blue Dots in diagram below)
The ARB Bar mount will be mounted to the sandwich plate at 5 points (Red Dots in diagram below),
Where the 2 Green arrows are, those are boltholes that I will have to drill into the ARB mount and bolt through both the sandwich plate and the chassis mount.
This will be very securely fitted and there wont be any chance of leverage or flex.
