Blue Ox Aftermarket Off-Road Bumper Adapter Review

Products Featured in this Video

Blue Ox Off-Road Bumper Adapters for Blue Ox Motorhome Mounted Tow Bars - 7/8" D-Rings

57 reviews

Code: BX88357

Retail: $403.70

Price:  $265.78

• Base Plates
• Aftermarket Bumper Adapters
• Hitch Pin Attachment

• Blue Ox

Lets you use your motorhome-mounted Blue Ox tow bar with your off-road bumper. Bumper must have 7/8" D-rings. Works with Aladdin, Alpha, Ascent, Avail, and Aventa LX tow bars.

Do you have a question about part BX88357?more information >     

Blue Ox Off-Road Bumper Adapters for Blue Ox Motorhome Mounted Tow Bars - 1" D-Rings

58 reviews

Code: BX88358

Retail: $403.70

Price:  $263.52

• Base Plates
• Aftermarket Bumper Adapters
• Hitch Pin Attachment

• Blue Ox

Lets you use your motorhome-mounted Blue Ox tow bar with your aftermarket off-road bumper. Bumper must have 1" D-rings. Works with Aladdin, Alpha, Ascent, Avail, and Aventa LX tow bars.

Do you have a question about part BX88358?more information >     

Review of the Blue Ox Aftermarket Off-Road Bumper Adapter

Hey everybody, how's it going Today, we're gonna be going over and showing you how to install, The Blue Ox aftermarket off-road bumper adapters. So these adapters are gonna be an important part of our flat tow setup. If we plan on flat towing a vehicle with an aftermarket bumper. Now this isn't gonna be specific to Jeeps, but I know a lot of you Jeep guys like to have these aftermarket bumpers on there, which is great. They really add to the aggressive off-road look of our vehicle. But they do pose a problem if we plan on flat towing.

The reason being, the base plate kits which mount to the frame, they're not necessarily designed around these aftermarket bumpers. It's pretty much impossible to do that. So thankfully, a lot of these aftermarket bumpers do have these welded on D-rings or in this case, these are bolted on. And what these D-rings allow us to do is, they allow us to hook a tow bar to them. Because again, attaching it to a frame-mounted base plate kit is not an option.

So these Blue Ox adapters here it's gonna be an excellent option for you to flat tow your vehicle with the aftermarket bumper. They fit a couple of different configurations of the D-rings. These are however, a standard size so there really shouldn't be too many issues. We will, however, go over how to choose the correct one for your particular setup. So here is what our adapter actually looks like.

It's gonna bolt onto the end of our tow bar here. It's just one bolt per side. And then it's gonna attach to the D-ring mount on our bumper. Now because this fits a range of different D-rings, we are gonna have some additional spacers and washers that we're gonna install in here depending on our D-ring configuration. There's also gonna be a couple different options depending on the hole size.

We have installed here the model which uses these seven eighths inch diameter pins. From my experience, that's the most popular size for the D-ring. But there is a larger one that uses a one inch diameter pin. So now that we've gone over whether or not these aftermarket adapters are gonna be needed for your setup, we can go ahead and show you how to get them installed. So the first thing we need to do to determine compatibility and which kit is gonna be right for us, we need to determine number one, what the size of the D-rings are on our actual bumper. And number two, whether they're rated for flat towing. So the manufacturer of the bumper is gonna be the end all means in regards to whether or not the D-rings can be used for flat towing. So you wanna make sure you reach out to them and ensure that it is compatible beforehand. But once we get the go ahead, in order to choose the correct one, we need to take two measurements. So the first thing we're gonna measure is the actual thickness of the D-ring here. So if we take a quick little measure right here, you can obviously just use a ruler, you don't need to get this precise. So it's gonna be about 0.89. As long as we're between five eighths and one inch, we're gonna be fine. In this case, we are. So then we can proceed to the next measurement. And that's gonna be measuring the inside hole here. So if we measure the inside opening of the hole there, that's gonna give us 0.8 inches. So again, about seven eights of an inch. So that's the kit we're gonna be using. So now that we know what kit we need, we're gonna go ahead and install them onto our tow bar. So here's what our D-ring adapters actually look like. So we're actually gonna be replacing these three prong adapters that come on our tow bar installed from the factory. So in order to do that, we're gonna be removing this bolt here. So we're gonna take our three quarter inch socket and three quarter inch wrench. Once we get loose, it should go ahead and just slide out. So once we have our three lug bracket out, we're gonna take our D-ring adapter bracket. We're gonna make sure we're paying attention to the sticker here because this is gonna be facing up. And then we're gonna take our new nylon washers. We're gonna place one on either side of the bracket. We're gonna line up our holes, and then we're gonna use the provided hardware in our kit here. So it takes a little bit of maneuvering to get everything to line up. But we can easily just adjust the washers as needed. We'll simply use that same combination of our three-quarter inch ratchet and wrench to tighten down. So in regards to the tightness though, we're just pretty much gonna be snugging it up. We don't want it so tight that the bracket can't move, but we also don't want too much slop. We really just need the bolt to protrude through the ends of the nyloc nut. Once we have this side on and tightened down, we'll just repeat the same process on the other side. Again, making sure we're paying attention to the orientation of the adapter. So that should be pretty good. So we went ahead and got our tow bar hooked up to the motor home here. Now we can go ahead and hook up to our D-rings. Now in your kit here, you're gonna get these spacers. So these spacers are gonna be used to fill the gap. The inside opening for our mount here is gonna be one inch. So if our D-ring shackle thickness is one inch, then we don't need any spacers. But if it's anything less than this, we will need to use one, or possibly multiple spacers to fill the gap. And simply what I mean by this is, when we go to put there up to the D-ring, you can see we have a little bit of a gap there. So we're simply gonna fill in that gap with one of our metal washers. And then we're gonna line up our holes and insert our pin. Once we get our pin inserted all the way through, we're gonna take the linchpin here. You wanna make sure the nose is facing the inside. We'll simply close it over there like so. And we'll just simply repeat that same process on the other side. Now, I'm not sure if it matters, but I would probably put that washer in the same location. We have this one on the inside here. I would probably mirror that on the other side as well. And that's gonna do it today for our look and installation of the Blue Ox aftermarket off-road bumper adapters..