• All tops (hard, soft & bikini) must fit after installation
• Give adequate space between the spreader bar and wiper motor
• The parking brake will need enough clearance (or modification)
• The glove box won’t have room to open (modify, take off or keep permanently closed)
• Wing windows need clearance (or the door needs to be opened to fully open the wing windows)
• Door window cranks may hit bars

The tubes that come in the Smittybilt kit are long enough to give you some leeway during installation. You have a few options to make sure that everything still works the way it did before. You can either give adequate clearance everywhere and deal with the vertical bars being very far back and possibly interfering with driving and getting in and out of the truck…or…put the bars right up against the dash and deal with not having your glove box or parking brake…or…you can choose to modify everything, create a lot of work for yourself, and turn a 3 hour cage installation into a two week tear down of the entire interior. I went with the latter.

Glove Box Modification

This is the stock glove box…and as soon as a bar goes in there it becomes completely useless! Some people never use their glove box anyway so it’s no great loss, but if you like the storage and (on some years) ever want to change any fuses, there are a few options. You can take the door off and use it as an open storage tray, you can hinge it on the right side instead of the bottom and open it sideways or you can do what I did and just move it.

This is what it looked like when the jig saw blade finally came to a stop. I just traced a perfect rectangle and cut clean, straight lines (well…not really. The corners weren’t square, and the lines were all over the place.) I should have actually been more careful with the cuts. If I did it again I would use a square and go nice and slow. The more square and straight the cut is the less welding and filling you’ll have to do later.

The cut out frame needs a little work before it can be turned up side down and expected to perform the way it should. The hinges and latch need to swap positions so that the hinges are on the new bottom and the latch is on top. Luckily there’s enough metal on both top and bottom to make this work. The lip on the old latch side (the new bottom) is too wide for the hinges and needs to be trimmed out as shown. The side to the left of the latch has not been trimmed and the side to the right has. Then holes need to be drilled for the latch and hinges. If you centered your cut top to bottom then everything should work well with just the factory play in the hinge and latch screws (I wasn’t quite centered so I had to enlarge some holes)

After welding the frame back in, grinding down all the welds, using a little bondo and repainting it, I realized that I really should have painted the whole dash. And since all the bezels on Bronco dashes are almost impossible to mask off, I took the whole dash out to paint it. If I had known I was going to take it off I would have welded it from behind and made my life a lot easier! I suppose that’s how working on a Bronco is sometimes.

So here’s the finished product. The new glove box position will work out well I think. It keeps full use of the box, door and hinges and puts the speaker grille behind the roll bar where it really does about as much good as it did in it’s stock location. Now that the glove box problem is taken care of it’s time to install the actual cage.

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Contents of the Smittybilt front cage kit.

At the very minimum a total of four cuts must be made to install the Smittybilt front rollcage. Two angled cuts where the side bars meet the floor plates and two “fishmouthed” cuts where the side bars attach to the main roll bar. (The spreader bar comes pre-cut to go between the side bars) The “fishmouth” cuts can be accomplished in a few different ways…a drill press with the right size holesaw would work pretty well, as would a gas torch with a little care. However since I don’t own either one of those tools, I used a hacksaw and a 4″ angle grinder. It sounds pretty inefficient, but it really didn’t take very long to get tight fitting joints.

Fitting the side bars requires some patience and careful measuring. Smittybilt purposely supplies these bars a few inches long so they can be trimmed to each specific truck. Although most trucks will vary, mine needed ~1/2″ off the bottom of each side bar and ~4″ off where the bars attach to the rear rollbar. The easiest way to accomplish a proper fit is to concentrate on just one side. Take the time to make that bar fit perfectly and then use it as a template when cutting the other side bar. This is especially important with the “fishmouthed” cuts.

Before any cuts are made place one side bar roughly in the position it will eventually be in. Rest the leading (lower) edge of the side bar on the floor of the truck so that it has proper clearance from both the door (~1″ on my truck) and the dash (~1/2″ on mine). Then hold the rear of the side bar up near the spot where it will intersect the main roll bar. (on most rollbars this will be right at the radius of the bend) I used a small level taped to the horizontal portion of the side bar (assuming the truck is on a level surface) and moved the rear end of the bar around until it was level.

Once you’ve determined the side bar is level make note of how much higher the horizontal of the side bar is than the horizontal of the main rollbar. This is approximately the amount you will need to cut off the end that attaches to the floor. However keep in mind that if you’re attaching the side bar to the rear bar in the middle of the radius it will be slightly lower. And if the rear bar is a larger diameter (as mine was) the side bar will be even lower. Also remember that you will have a 1/4″ mounting plate between the side bar and the floor and that your cut will be at a slight angle to match the floor. This can make quite a difference in final placement if you forget it.

Making the “fishmouth” cuts just takes a careful eye. Try to hold the side bar up against the roll bar near the radius. (One way of finding out where the side bars should intersect the rear bar is to measure the spreader bar. The distance between the side bars should be approximately the same at the front as it is at the rear.) Standing beside the truck in line with the horizontal of the main roll bar, try to sight down the bar while holding up the side bar and mark the shape and size of the fishmouth that will be needed to attach the side bar to the radius. I found it safer to make the bar a little long and grind it down than try to mark it perfectly the first time. If you’re anything like me your vision of the “fishmouth” shape won’t be exactly right anyway and will require some grinding before it fits nicely. If you do accidentally cut the bar too short it simply means the spot where it attaches to the floor will be further away from the dash.

Once the cuts are made to both side bars and you’re happy with the fit, tack weld the floor mounting plates to the side bars. It works best to have the side bars in place resting (and centered) on the mounting plates before welding. Placing the spreader bar is a little tricky without a second pair of hands but can be done alone if you get creative with duct tape and C-clamps. Once you have the spreader bar in place turn on the windshield wipers to make sure the arm doesn’t hit it. This is a good time to check all other clearances (glove box, e-brake, window cranks, hard top, etc.) It’s a lot easier to fix it now than after final welding. Once you’re satisfied with the fit, make a few tack welds at all the connections. While it’s possible to completely weld up the cage in the truck the chances of you setting your garage on fire are much higher. It seems like a pain but it really is easier at this point to unbolt the main roll bar and lift the whole cage out of the truck. It will be both easier to weld and paint once it’s out of the truck.

In addition to the basic cage I also decided to install a center roof panel. Basically this consisted of two extra lengths of 2″ tubing that I cut to fit between the spreader bar and the rear bar. I placed them about 11″ apart so that I could put my CB, some speakers and two dome lights up in the cage. These two bars were covered by a 14 gauge sheet metal cap and fully welded to keep the rain away from the electronics. Since I knew I would be needing power up in the cage before I started building it, I drilled holes in the side bars and spreader bars and ran all my power leads and speaker wires inside the cage tubing. The wires enter the tube from the passengers side under the dash and come out up near the CB and speakers. It proved to be much more of a hassle to run the wires internally, but then again nothing about Broncos is easy, right?

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Most have run into the problem of where to put that big ol’ Hi-Lift jack. Well a couple of my buddies had a solution. I copied their idea and now present it to you.

This mount cost about 10 dollars. And all the parts can bought at your local hardware and parts stores.

Parts needed:

• Two exhaust clamps (same size as your roll bar tubing, they all seem to be 3/8 thread)
• Two 3/8 wing nuts
• 2 pieces of 3/8 all thread
• 2 3/8 coupling nuts (its like a long nut)
• 4 nylon spacers with 3/8 diameter hole in the middle

The mount is simple. Put the 2 exhaust clamps on the part of your roll bar that angles back form the center loop. Only attach using one of the exhaust clamp nuts on each exhaust clamp.

On the other side of the exhaust clamp, screw on the coupling nut.

At this point you have two options. One is to put a piece of all thread in the coupling nut. You then put a spacer in after that. Put the hi-lift on the all thread after the spacer. Add another spacer and screw on the wing nut. Done!!!!!

The other option is to use a 3/8 bolt instead of the all thread an wing nut.

This is what I did originally. It works well but there a few things that I do not like about it. First, screwing the nut in and out every time that you use the jack is more of pain than spinning of a 2 wing nuts. The other thing I do not like about it is that you have to hold it and line it up when you mount it. With the first method, you just it on the all thread and it stays. With the bolt method, you have to put the bolt through, put the spacer on bolt after the jack and then balance it all while you get the nut started. That pretty much explains how you do it!

Both methods work well and are easy. A couple of things be aware of. If you mount your exhaust clamp to low (like I did), you cannot use the wing nut method for that clamp. There is not enough clearance between the all thread and bed rail to get the hi lift in place. The other thing is that these pictures show the mount on a Protofab roll bar. This will also work on a smittybilt cage. My buddy has got the same setup on his Smittybilt.

I need to give special thanks to Tony and Greg for giving me this idea!

Tech article by Steve Wedeking (66horse)

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