C4x4.com

The FJ80 Land Cruiser wagon is a surprisingly capable off road vehicle despite its luxurious interior and amenities. Available with factory lockers, compliant coil suspension, full floating straight axles, and a torquey six cylinder engine the FJ80 is pretty good stock but it can stand some improvement when it comes to 'trail hardening' for body protection.

In this case we are working with a friend's Lexus badged FJ80, called a LX450, for which we had previously built rocker guards. Following that, we were inspired to install a new rear bumper after the stock one was crunched in a fender-bender. Kaymar makes a pretty nice set-up that was purchased at TLC, a Toyota Cruiser specialist in Southern California.

We did not have to remove the factory bumper as the little car that hit the LX450 did that for us and it also removed the frame mounted class 3 trailer hitch in the process.

We also lowered the spare tire and got it out of the way. The first surprise we ran into was related to the damage from the accident. The Kaymar bumper that the owner chose to install is also a tow bumper as well as a tire carrier and gas can carrier mounting point. It uses the same mounting points that the reciever hitch did plus some others to boot. However, we were bummed to see that the impact had sheared off three of the 14mm bolts that use blind nuts inside the passenger side frame rail. In fact, one bolt/nut combo had actually 'plowed' its way through about a 1/4 inch of frame before it let go.

We welded a nut onto the part of the bolt that was juuuust sticking out at the bottom of the frame. The heat and big wrench removed two of the sheared bolts, but the third required surgery since it had actually torn the steel frame and now the nut would no longer be lined up to the new bumper holes. We cut out the bottom of the frame at the nut/bolt and made up a new patch of 3/16 steel with a 1/2 inch nut welded to the backside. It was placed over the opening in the frame and carefully measured for placement before being welded in place and painted up.

Now that that was done, we could proceed.

We followed the instructions as we went. We did need to relocate the license plate bracket for future use of a tire carrier, so while the carrier will be added later, we drilled the holes while we had the bumper off the truck. In order to stay legal in California we will need to wire in a light for the license plate when the tire carrier is installed. Kaymar makes a kit for that, too.

There are a couple of tricks to this install. One part uses some plates with attached nuts that need to be inserted into the ends of the framerails. There are wires welded to the plates that serve as handles to place the plates into the frame. Now one thing that made this really slick (it could have been nasty otherwise), was that TLC supplied the buyer with a bit of mastic (sticky goo in a roll) that we placed between the plates and the frame. You can see some of it squeezing out in the pics at the center of the plate. We centered the plates in the frame holes, took the bolts and threaded them into the plate by hand until they were pretty snug and then gave them a quick cinching down to smash the mastic and hold the plate in place. Then we removed the bolts and slid the bumper into place. All the bolts, the six 14mm bolts under the framerails and the 4 others (all total) in the side of the frame rails were installed loosely to make sure it all lined up. It did! That was a nice surprise.

You can see in the pics that there are spacers supplied with the bumper that fit between the bumper and the bottom of the frame rails around each of the 14mm bolts. This makes up for the gap between the two pieces. We had to adjust some for our welded in patch so we deleted the spacer and used heavy washers till it was correct...you will not have to do that. The final bolts were placed between the rear crossmember and the rear face of the bumper above the receiver hitch. Note: The instructions mentioned drilling out the holes here before installing the bumper. We did not and everything fit fine, so I dunno?

The owner will add the tire carrier later but he was pleased to find that his spare tire still fit underneath and it is a metric equivalent to a 33" tire, too. There are lights to install that tap into the factory wiring harness and provide extra lighting to the bumper corners. Very nice. The owner also purchased the bumper with the gas can carrier option, so there are spindles at each end of the bumper that are welded in that will stick up unless you use them for the carrier pieces. There are rubber covers that you can get to cap these, but for now we threaded some nylock nuts onto the spindles to protect the threads against damage.

Here is how it turned out. The lights are not connected yet, so I cannot show that part, but the instructions said the supplied harness taps into the factory wiring with no splicing, etc, and it matches the factory plugs. Notice how well the sides of the bumper follow the body lines. The aluminum brite plate cover is nice looking but is thin so if you use the bumper as a rear step, do not put your weight too far to the inside of the bumper or it would likely bend the plate.