"cantrelm" wrote in message
. ..
If the bumper were suitable for load-bearing then why does Jeep not sell
this simple little option.

One thing that I noticed that I would at least re-engineer a bit was the
fact that it appears that his hitch plate does not have a backing plate
behind the thin metal of the Jeep bumper... I would think that he should at
least have a backing plate as large as the hitch plate inside the bumper to
distribute the load across a greater area... An even better idea might be to
have this backing plate large enough to traverse the full with of the
bumper... Once you're at that point, maybe you should even consider having
this 'backing plate' tie in to the frame of the vehicle... Of course, by
this point, it would have probably been easier to just build a real bumper
from scratch... grin

There is a reason you can not buy a Jeep with a bumper hitch
option on it. I would think that the Jeep engineers know what
they are doing,

Not a good analogy... These are the same engineers who designed the
problematic manifold that cracks and the motor mount bolts that haved
sheered off on my XJ multiple times?