Westin Sportsman Grille Guard - 1 Piece - Black Powder Coated Steel

Video Transcript for Westin Sportsman Grille Guard Installation - 2003 Ford Explorer Sport Trac

Today on our 2003 Ford Explorer Sport Trac we're going to take a look at and also show you how to install the Westin Sportsman Grille Guard. This one-piece grille guard offers a black powder coating on a steel frame. The Part Number is 40-0805. This is a very rugged brush guard. It gives a superior protection. It's going to protect from dents on maybe our bumper or our hood, our grill, our headlight areas, just to give us superior protection whether it's from brush that may come up and rub our vehicle while we're offroad or other hazards that we can sometimes find running across the road. You see the smaller bars here. These are going to give us full headlight protection without hampering our headlight performance and they're very easily removable.

On each side here we've got two bolt that are holding this cover in place. If we need to access our headlight, we don't have to worry about pulling the whole brush guard off the front of the vehicle. You'll see here we've got rubber pads that go around the actual push portion of of the bumper. If we need to push equipment around with our vehicle, we will be able to do that and, of course, we need to do that at very low speeds. You don't want to ram enforce anything. You just easily move up to something.

You are able to use this to push items around. We've got a double bar design that's going to be here on the top and gives it a really nice look. The main brace across the middle here is going to provide two areas for us to connect lights. They're going to stay inset just slightly so they're going to be protected as well. Then we have another nice cross tube here on the bottom to give us excellent, excellent strength and durability. This is a really easy bolt-on installation. It's going to come with custom brackets.

Those are going to mount to already existing attachment points on our vehicle. We've not going to have to worry about doing any drilling or any modifications to the vehicle whatsoever. Another feature that's very nice is we're still going to have full access into our under hood area. Our latch is right here so it will be easy to get to. Our hood is going to go up and stay up without any kind of issues or any kind of problem. It closes just the same with no interference, but it does stay nice and close to the vehicle so we're not adding a big three foot attachment to the front of the vehicle or anything.

You see nice close clearances here. We only add to the front of the vehicle what we need. To begin our installation for our grille guard we're going to be taking this panel down here just so we can access our bolt hole locations. We've got three bolts to remove where they're kind of screws here in the front. We've got one, two and three. For that I'm going to use a 5/16". We'll want to come to our frame rail here. You can follow that cover up and over. We've got a couple of bolts here that we need to take out. These have a 10mm head on them. There's one here and there should be one up here a little bit further. As you can see, this one is missing. We'll take out the one on this side and then we'll get the two on this side. Now, with those out we've got a small Christmas tree fastener on each side. We'll get that pulled down and that should allow us to bring our cover down and set it aside. Now we need to get in to the two bolts that are holding our two hooks in place. You see we've got one right here and then one right behind it. We'll need a 15mm here. It's kind of tight but you'll be able to get in there and get to them. These in the back are a little bit easier to get to from underneath. Once we have both bolts out we should be able to slide our tow hook right out of the front there. Just so you know, both of our bolts for our tow hook thread into this nut plate. When we start putting stuff back together we've got to be sure our bolts thread in there. Now, our brackets, these are going to go right above our tow hooks and they're going to be sandwiched in there using our original hardware. One thing I want you to keep in mind is that in the set of instructions that we have they've mislabeled our brackets. They've got the driver and calling it the passenger and the passenger they're calling the driver. What we're looking for specifically is for the side with the two holes to go on top of the tow hook and then we want the side with the three holes to be facing towards the outside of the vehicle. This is the one we're going to use for the driver side. Our single hole needs to be forward. As long as you're doing that you're doing it the right way. We're going to bring our bolt up and through there, get it put up in position and, remember the nut plate I showed you, we just want to get it threaded into that. Now we'll want to make sure our nut plate is in position there. Slide our tow hook in with our bracket and we want to thread that up into our nut plate. Let's align the one here in the front and get it started as well. We'll do the same thing for our passenger side keeping in mind that we want the holes in the bracket towards the outside of the vehicle and the single hole forward. Now I'm going to run my bolts in just a little bit just to take out some of the slack. We want it to be flexible though because that's going to allow us to get our brush guard nice and level. Now with the help of a couple of extra sets of hands we're ready to get our grille guard put up into position. The flanges that stick out on each side that we're going to use to bolt it into place, those should slide on the outside of the brackets we just installed. Now to secure it we're going to use the black stainless steel hardware. It's a good idea to use some anti-seize on it. That's going to prevent them from getting in there and locking up to where we won't be able to remove it if we ever need to. This is Part Number LT-37616. All right, guys. That looks good and a little bit more, right there. Now we're going to slide our bolts in from the outside. You'll see we've got a flat washer that we've already put on there. Inside we're going to put on another flat washer. Then we've got a lock washer and then we're going to thread on the hex nut. We'll want to get a couple of these started on each side while we've got our partners here helping us. We've got three attachment points. Each attachment point will get the same hardware. We're going to leave this just loosely installed for now. With two started on each side that should hold in into position. Now let's go underneath and we'll get our last set of hardware installed. Now what I'm going to do is push all the way back on my tow hook on each side here and then I want to snug those down so they don't move. I'm not going to do final torque or anything in case we need to adjust it slightly, but I do want to get those in position so they don't move around. All right. Now what we want to do is just get everything leveled out. That way we can insure that it's going to look appropriate on the vehicle. The first thing you want to do of course is check the vehicle for level. Once we've got that leveled out we want to insure that our push bar is going to match that. We also want to level front to back so it's not tilted down. Once we've found that position we'll want somebody to hold it in place for us while we get our hardware snugged down. We'll get as many checks on it as we can. That way we can insure we got it right where we want it. Let's get at least two of our bolts tightened down while we're holding that in position. Once we have those snug, recheck everything and make sure we've got it where we want it. All right. We're ready to start torquing them down to the specifications that are listed in our instructions. Now we'll start by torquing down the bolts on our tow hooks here. With those torqued down we'll move on to the bolts securing our brush guard to our bracket. Now we can get our panel down here reinstalled. It's easiest to use those push fasteners to hold it into place and then we'll get our hardware started. All right. That's all there is to it. Now with our appearance panel back in place, that's going to complete the installation of the Westin Sportsman Grille Guard, Part Number 40-0808 on our 2003 Ford Explorer Sport Trac.