Our Sites

Harvesting a bumper crop of bumpers

Fabricator thrives with tubular bumpers in competitive aftermarket

When viewed from a distance—a great distance—all pickup trucks look about the same. All have a cab, a bed, and four wheels. Get a little closer and differences start to emerge. The beds vary in length and the cabs come in three styles: regular, extended, and crew. If you dig into the dimensions and other specs, you realize that the longest trucks have wheelbases about 36 in. longer than the shortest trucks and the biggest outweigh the smallest by 40 percent. Automatic or manual transmission, two-wheel drive or four-wheel drive, gasoline or diesel, and a variety of trim packages make modern pickup trucks about as varied as modern passenger cars. A single model can have more than 15 variations.

Even so, some pickup owners scour aftermarket catalogs, looking for additional or replacement parts to add a unique touch or two—winches, fog lights, toolboxes, storage racks, and the list goes on. Fabricator and entrepreneur Grant Mallicote entered the aftermarket industry, literally by accident, when he made and then perfected a custom pickup truck bumper. His company, Bodyguard® Truck Accessories, Paris, Texas, fabricates tube and plate to make functional, aggressive-looking replacements for original bumpers. The company augments its bumpers with a second product line, side steps.

Not bad for a guy who never had any big ambition to be a business owner or a fabricator.

A Collision With Destiny

Mallicote did a little fabricating when he was growing up, but he didn’t have any formal training. The son of a rancher, he learned how to handle a welding torch at a young age, and like most farmers and ranchers, the bulk of his experience was in common repairs, a gate here, a piece of equipment there, and anything else made from steel that needed fixing.

One day his father returned from making the rounds with a crumpled front bumper. Grant couldn’t do much to help the injured cow, but being a bona fide rancher, he figured he could save his father a few dollars by fabricating a bumper. Using some leftover tubing, some scrap steel plate, and a little ingenuity, he fashioned a replacement. Although it was more functional than aesthetic, it didn’t look bad, and it wasn’t long before quite a few Mallicotes had custom-made bumpers on their trucks. As time went on, many Mallicote neighbors had tubular bumpers, and then they started popping up all over town. When Mallicote started getting orders from beyond the local area, he knew he was onto something good.

Little by Little

The phrase “Everything’s bigger in Texas” rings true in many ways, but Mallicote didn’t take big strides to build his business. He proceeded slowly, taking many small steps to develop the company’s products. In doing so, he built a business in which every aspect overlaps and reinforces the others: The product designs, manufacturing processes, metalworking equipment, and even the advertising strategy seem to work together as a whole.

Product Line. Although he doesn’t have a design background, Mallicote has a good sense of how the product should look and he has an eye for detail, said Kelli Mallicote, the company’s advertising manager.

Bodyguard bumpers’ unique look is based on their construction, which is mainly 11⁄4- to 2-in. round tubing and steel plate from 0.0747 to 0.1875 in. thick. The other factor is what they protect. Factory bumpers wrap around the front of the vehicle down low, around the height of the tires. These bumpers do much more, encompassing the grille area to protect the radiator, headlights, and turn signal lamps (see Figure 1). Many of the bumpers also wrap around the front end, which is the origin of the company’s name.

As such, they stand out. You can’t miss a Bodyguard bumper. However, they don’t stand out too much—that is, they conform to the shape and contours of the vehicle. In Mallicote’s view, they have to look like they were meant to be part of the vehicle, not just tacked on.

“We don’t make universal products,” he said.

Figure 1
A successful aftermarket design does more than merely bolt on. It has to conform to the vehicle’s contours and it cannot interfere with any other features or accessories. Grant Mallicote goes to great lengths to ensure that Bodyguard designs are tailored to each truck model.

Still, this doesn’t mean that every component that goes into every bumper is unique. As Mallicote developed the product line, tailoring bumpers and side steps for various truck models, he realized that designing a few universal parts would simplify both manufacturing and logistics. This wasn’t necessarily easy in the early days, but as the company’s technology has improved, Mallicote has been able to standardize many components.

“Initially I used a tape measure and cardboard to make templates and I relied a lot on hand-drawn sketches,” Mallicote said. Eventually the company transitioned to 2-D software and then to SolidWorks®.

Equipment. “The first bender I bought was a Pro-Tools manual bender, a ratcheting unit,” Mallicote said. It wasn’t necessarily fast, but it was fast enough to keep up with the orders in the beginning, in the early 2000s. Eventually he added an air-over-hydraulic conversion kit to speed things up a bit. As time went on and the number of unique bumper assemblies multiplied, Mallicote realized he’d improve the company’s throughput if he invested in a more complex machine, one that could store bend programs, so he replaced the original unit with a programmable draw bender from Baileigh.

For cutting, the company uses a 5- by 20-ft. plasma table outfitted with a Hypertherm high-definition unit capable of cutting material up to 11⁄2 in. thick.

The company used to outsource the plate bending, but it had enough work to justify a press brake. To keep up with forecast production demands and deal with increasingly complex parts, Mallicote invested in a 12-ft.-long, 350-ton Accurpress machine with a 6-axis backgauge and outfitted it with Wila tooling.

Advertising. Like nearly all small businesses, Bodyguard relied heavily on word-of-mouth advertising in its early days. Mallicote augmented this with a simple yet dazzling idea: He adorns each bumper with a metal decal that bears the company name and telephone number. The bumpers draw attention to themselves and indirectly to the decal, which is an inexpensive, mobile, and effective advertisement. Phone calls turn into additional sales that deploy an ever-expanding number of these decals.

Powder Coating. Taking a cue from Henry Ford, Bodyguard’s products are available in any color the customer wants, as long as he wants black. Ford’s choice supposedly was driven by production speed; black paint was found to dry the quickest. Mallicote’s choice is just a matter of practicality. Black goes with everything, and besides that, he sure isn’t going to inventory every automotive paint color known to mankind. It would be endlessly complicated, and it probably wouldn’t go well at the customer end anyway. Two risks are a slight color mismatch and paint damage during transit. Nobody wants to install a custom-painted part that is scratched or chipped.

For those who want to match the vehicle’s color, nothing stands in the way of having a local auto repair shop handle it. The customer can have any color he wants, even if it’s not black.

Very Custom Bumpers and Side Steps

The often-asked question in the aftermarket industry is, Can I install this myself? Mallicote estimates that about half of his customers install the company’s products at home in their garages. Side steps are easy, but the bumper assemblies take a lot of brute force to lift into place. Mallicote figures that it takes an engine hoist or a six-pack to compensate two strong buddies for doing the heavy lifting while the customer does the wrenching.

The other big question is, How well will this part fit my vehicle? Every enthusiast has a story or two about a component that didn’t seem to fit well.

A shortcut in the aftermarket industry is to develop a part for several body styles. Depending on the part and its design—and the perspective of the vehicle owner, who just parted with a few of his hard-earned dollars to get his hands on it—that part might not look good on that specific car or truck model. Bolt hole alignment is one thing; a good fit is something else altogether.

This is where Mallicote, aiming to distinguish his company’s products in a crowded market, doesn’t cut corners. The company makes nearly 200 bumper styles, marketing 105 unique part numbers in its Traditional series bumpers, 31 in its T2 series, and 56 in its Assault series. While an accounting director in a big company would lean on the engineering team to reduce the number of designs to reduce the number of SKUs and thereby eliminate some costs, Mallicote goes the other direction to make sure each bumper fits well with the style, shape, and contours of each particular model.

“Our No. 1 priority is to tailor the look,” Mallicote said.

It means that the company has to carry quite a bit of inventory to support its catalog, and the catalog grows every time a truck gets a redesign, but at least it’s getting easier to keep up. The Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) launched SEMA Garage, a series of initiatives to assist aftermarket components and systems manufacturers. By organizing measuring, scanning, and photography sessions, SEMA Garage gives aftermarket manufacturers access to information on new vehicles, in some cases before they hit the streets. It also has an emissions lab for testing exhaust components, 3-D printer capability for mocking up parts, and an installation center for test-fitting parts.

All that sounds great for aftermarket manufacturers, but some might consider it just the icing on the cake. The cake is a program called Tech Transfer, in which the automobile makers provide actual CAD files, eliminating the need for reverse engineering.

“Tech Transfer helps the aftermarket industry make better products to go onto their products,” Mallicote explained.

Of course, it takes time and money to travel to participate in the measuring, scanning, and photography sessions, and Tech Transfer requires an annual subscription to participate, but in the end these investments pay off in accelerating the time to market for aftermarket parts and they also help to improve the part’s fit. The SEMA Garage programs provide extremely precise measurements, down to ± 0.001 in. in the case of Tech Transfer. For a fabricator like Mallicote, this eliminates mistakes and guesswork.

“These typically are excellent files, and almost without exception, the part fits the first time,” Mallicote said. “It sure beats using a tape measure and cardboard.”

About the Author
FMA Communications Inc.

Eric Lundin

2135 Point Blvd

Elgin, IL 60123

815-227-8262

Eric Lundin worked on The Tube & Pipe Journal from 2000 to 2022.