Rampage bumper carnage

Up venture · Feb 21, 2020

While trying to help a friend recover his plow truck last night on a snow covered logging road. I tugged on his truck from the rear and moved it but it wasn't working out. So then the plan was for me to try and make it around his truck and pull him from the front. By this time we had another friend and a third truck that would recover mine. Well I bagged it then and the third truck wasn't able to recover me from the rear. So now we go to plan 'c' which is to drive around the loop and pull us out from the front. He backs up to turn around and bags it. So on to plan 'd' I spool out nearly all 95 feet of my winch and start reeling it in. The winch performed flawless in my recovery and I was out next up get the original truck. The trucks were not all that stuck like in deep mud but for the most part lacked traction on the ice and snow. So we rig up my truck and strap that we had just broke. We decided to use the broken strap as we had to rig around the plow and didn't want to damage another strap. We'll start winching and the truck starts moving all is good until the strap breaks at both ends at my knot and at the factory loop. So once again we rig up with a fresh strap. Start winching and truck starts to move. I can feel my truck really bite down as the winch works. Keeping in mind I have an 8k winch and the bumper is supposed to handle up to 12k. The winch The winch (Warn vr8) was under load but didn't seem to be peaked out or stall. Then the loud bang from the front and we stop all recovery to discover the carnage. It seemed that the welds that connect the mounts to the actual bumper are greatly insufficient. The pulling action from the winch was greater that the welds could withstand peeling the bumper forward. Well seeing as were still in BFE and its getting late we go back to tugging. When I received a friendly reminder to buckle up. On my first forward pull I gave it a healthy jerk which resulted in my face meeting the visor or the freedom panel hold down leaving me with a nice little goose egg. Finally get all the trucks out and called an end to the night cold, sore and banged up.

I held off on posting this until the customer service had a chance to respond. I would have to say that they really pulled through and without a hassle. I contacted Rampage this morning and they responded back within a couple hours asking for my details. The next email was a confirmation of a new bumper on the way. We'll be doing an inspection and possibly some welding on the replacement to hopefully prevent this from happening again.