Bull Bars are very high on the shopping list of desirable items for a 4wd enthusiast. Apart from the obvious aesthetic considerations for fitting a Bull Bar, there are a number of important benefits.
The most important of these is frontal protection of your vehicle. Bull Bars were originally designed to mitigate damage to the front of your vehicle during an animal strike. A broken radiator when stranded far away from civilisation with no means of communication could be potentially lethal. A well designed Bull Bar could also prevent such unfortunate animals from breaching the vehicle cabin and injuring the occupants.
Bull Bars also form a great mounting platform for various off-road vehicle accessories. These include spot lights, communication antennae, recovery winches, recovery points and high lift jacking points. Another advantage of replacement Bull Bars is that in most cases, the design of the Bar can improve the vehicle approach angle when off-roading.
There are two very important considerations when looking to fit a Bull Bar to your shiny new 4wd. Fitting a solid steel, full bumper replacement Bull Bar to the front of your 4wd could significantly change the dynamics of your vehicle in a frontal collision. This is potentially going to have a negative impact on the correct operation of the various collision safety systems in most modern vehicles, specifically the SRS or airbag systems. A poorly designed and engineered Bull bar could thus prevent the SRS from operating correctly during a collision or indeed cause the airbags to deploy unnecessarily resulting in additional repair costs.
In addition to this, the original vehicle design engineer never intended your 4wd to have this additional load hanging off the front of the chassis. Hanging a poorly designed and engineered Bull Bar off the front chassis members of your 4wd could also cause undue stress to these chassis members due to the excessive weight. Add to this the weight of a recovery winch and you have another area of potential disaster.
The combined weight of your new Bull Bar and winch could add between 100 to 150kg of weight up front. This is going to compress the front suspension resulting in a loss in ride height as well as a loss in the available upward suspension travel. In all likelihood you are going to have to consider fitting uprated suspension to the front of your vehicle to compensate for this which is going to increase the total cost of this exercise.
Reputable Bull Bar manufacturers spend a massive amount of money during the design and engineering phase to prevent the above issues from spoiling your 4wd experience. These Bull Bars are designed and tested to be SRS compliant. Additional chassis stress is also managed within the safe parameters of the original vehicle design. Another area that is carefully considered is the effect that the Bull Bar may have on the supply and flow of sufficient cool air to the vehicle radiator.
All Ironman 4×4 bull bars are certified to be winch and airbag compatible to ensure you and your family’s safety isn’t compromised.
