Jonathan_JK

Funny part is most people that have stingers in my town don't rock crawl or wheel. If I had to take a guess 80% of Jeeps in my town have never seen a hard trail or an off-road park.

Bull bar for me is to protect my winch from something coming down on it. probably also would protect against a minor accident but I would not count on it.

Wrangeler X

key word here is smittybilt! A good bumper from crawler conceptz would have held up.

Mike H.

It's my understanding that their purpose if to keep the radiator from being crushed during a flop/roll.
That is also why a bolt on windshield/frame is nice. Roll the rig, buy a new frame and glass... not have the rig totaled due to compromised structure.

Rednroll

I never heard this one before. Good to know. Now I'll be looking at bull bars and trying to determine if they come up high enough to protect the radiator.

Joe_B

Stingers are used to save the rad/motor in a rollover. A bull bar will only protect the rad & winch from front impact but in a roll it does nothing for saving the motor.

BoraBora

Spend the $ on a legitimate bumper with gussets on the bar/stinger. It'll hold up.

Mike H.

run a string line from your cage forward over the rad... might surprise you how a bull bar "might" do the trick.

Chefbrujo

I've used it mostly for pushing foliage out of the way. If you're comin up on anything taller than ur bumper, it's a good thing to have. That and the added protection is not imaginary. Seems like there are some haters on the bars lol, not sure why. They aren't just for looks.

Mark Doiron

I agree. If you buy a quality bumper. My Shrockworks with optional winch hoop (another name for the same item) recently saved my $1600 winch from being destroyed.


Lost somewhere a couple hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Photo by my friend, Ray.

Rednroll

The argument can also be made that if you buy a quality bumper, then your winch sits inside your bumper and not outside of it.

I'm definitely not hating on them, I apologize if that is how it seems. It's just for all the reasons I've read for their supposed uses always seem kind of lame to me where it's pretty easy to shoot holes in those justifications. The ones that make the most sense are looks and for mounting lights as I originally mentioned. For example, with the radiator protection in the event of rolling over? It would seem to me, that in the event of a roll over you might have a lot more other concerns you might want to address outside of protecting your radiator. Probably the biggest of them being is in your own personal safety by placing a focus more on reinforcing your roll cage over that of getting a bull bar unless you consider protecting your radiator is a higher priority than protecting your life. The other being in determining when the dirty side is facing up, in figuring out how you're going to get the dirty side back to facing down and the other damage that is likely to occur that will prevent your Jeep from moving forward once it has rolled over.

For pushing objects? The majority of bull bars for the JK I've seen sit behind the bumper so that seems all kind of dependent on the bumper and bull bar you got since not all of them seem to serve that purpose. If your bull bar looks like this, then yes, pushing objects using a bull bar makes sense but I'm just not seeing many bull bars for the JK that look like this.



Winch protection? That massive steel outside casing of a winch we're trying to protect where the most common failures of a winch are due to internal damage such as gears and electrical? Get a bumper that protects the winch.

Like I said, I have the AEV front bumper which comes in bull bar and non bull bar flavors and the winch mounts inside of both AEV bumpers. Therefore in that particular example the bull bar seems kind of useless and AEV makes light brackets for mounting lights on top of the bumper. I admit that I overlooked the radiator protection in the event of a roll-over, because I guess I was thinking there were more important things that may need protection in the event of a roll over. Again, I'm not hating, if you decided you needed a bull bar then I'm sure you have good reasons, I'm just not seeing those same justifications from my perspective.


Do I need additional winch protection?