Bull bars come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Purchasing a bull bar for your rig isn’t a small investment so it’s important to know exactly what your hard earned cash is getting you. I’ve detailed below so of the important elements to a quality new front bar.

Winch Bar or Bull Bar

You may have in your future plans to buy and fit a winch. If you’ve not bought a bar that caters for a winch from the outset, you’ll find you’ll need to buy another bar when winch time comes. Some people will claim that standard bull bars can be re-enforced to cater for a winch. Just remember that winches create huge forces, so I wouldn’t take the chance on a cut and shut, sorry re-enforced, bar.

Alloy or Steel

Personally it’s steel bars for me all the way. Steel bars offer substantially more protection than an alloy bar, which yes, means that you’ve got to carry around the extra weight – but when you hit your first tree, you’ll be thankful for it. They also enable the fitting of additional towing and jacking points. Important with recoveries, I do think that alloy bars look better, and are lighter

Tow points

A quality bull bar will usually come with a couple of very handy extra tow points. Go and grab yourself a couple of high tensile bow shackles and it will cut down your recovery time substantially.

Jack Points

As well as tow points, a quality bull bar will have multiple points to fix your high lift jack. When you’re replacing a tyre in the bush, rarely will you have nice flat terrain, so these extra jacking points can also come in very handy.

Entry and departure angles

Bull bars should increase your entry and departure angles. Unfortunately cheap bars can actually decrease the angle that you can enter a rise from flat. Documentation for a bull bar you is going to buy, should tell you how much of a gain you’ll get.

Unfortunately, like most things, you’ll get what you pay for. Cheap bars won’t have the solid build, be winch ready, and have all the nice features you’ll really value at a later date.

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