Had time between conference calls today to lay in the rain and fiddle with the bumper a bit. Some better overall shots:
Ignore the wiring hanging down, still buttoning things up at this point.
Bottom of the bumper sits at roughly the same height as the stock bumper, no real loss or gain there. The trailer hitch receiver is built in behind the license plate though so I picked up all that clearance by ditching the factory hitch that hung below the bumper.
Overall the bumper seems very well made and fabricated. There's a few areas where the welds aren't pretty, but appear to have penetrated well enough that they're strong. The powder coating only had one small chip that I touched up with some spray on bed liner.
There were a few things that didn't work quite like they should. The first was the mounting cut outs for the license plate lights:
Everything is in roughly the right spot, and to get everything to line up all I had to do was some trimming of the plastic tabs on the light housings. But the stock Tacoma light housings have a little bit of an angle at the front of them so they don't mount flat to the new bumper once you put the fastener in:
Found a couple replacement option online that is flat and has LED lights and some auxiliary red indicators for a little more visibility. Should show up tomorrow and I'll get them mounted.
The recovery points at the back are tied directly to the frame as the mounting points of the bumper which is nice vs just being welded onto the bumper itself:
Welds around the receiver are...eh...but the receiver is tied into the rest of the bumper quite well. I would have liked to have seen the square tubing come through the bumper by a 1/2" or so and then be welded. Don't intend to tow anything crazy though and I'm sure this will work fine.
The swing out is held closed by a spring loaded T handle and has a safety pin as backup to keep it from swinging open over rough terrain. Unfortunately when the safety pin is installed the t handle couldn't fully engage and things would bind up when trying to open the latch. Solved this by drilling out the hole for the T handle another 1/8". Closes solidly now with no binding and no rattles.
Before:
After:
After making sure everything worked I hit the now raw metal with bed liner.
Only other thing I see I'm going to tackle right away is some sort of material mounted around the hinge for the swingout. There's another T handle there that rides on the mount and then snaps down in place when the swingout is open 90 degrees to hold it in place. The pin from the T handle rides across that surface and it's going to wear off the powdercoating over time. I'm going to cut a semi-circle of HDPE and attach it with counter sunk screws so that the pin will ride on that instead to prevent the wear.
Overall I'm pretty happy with the bumper. There's plenty of real estate on the swing out to mount heavy things up high and as far behind the rear axle as possible. The optimal positioning for additional weight.