W.I.P. making custom billet style grill for Raptor

I've done some looking around (few hours here and there) and haven't really found many good looking aftermarket grills for our trucks. T-Rex makes a couple but I don't really like the cheesy looking fake chrome bolts and I don't really think they'd look good on my molten orange SCAB Raptor (don't mean to offend anyone with the T-Rex grill). Anyways I saw in the picture for the Boatec fenders a billet grill with the OEM "FORD" on it and it got me thinking.... "That looks custom, there are five billet bars and our OEM grills have four rows of honey comb, this is probably just a modified OEM grill." Now I don't know if any of y'all have done this yet (spent a half hour on google looking for it but didn't have the patience to comb through the forums) but I'm going to attempt to recreate and possibly improve this grill. If any of y'all have done this please comment, no need to post something that's already been done lol. I just ordered a second OEM grill yesterday so I hope to start this build sometime next week (I'm in Canada so shipping might take a while)

ICON 4x4 (Note, NOT Icon Vehicle Dynamics, guess who made that mistake...) made this grille: this grille

Which I kinda like. It's like the same mesh pattern as the OEM but just without the FORD. I can't find the original article but I believe they made laser scans of the oem grille so that they could do it again if need be.

amphibian said:

ICON 4x4 (Note, NOT Icon Vehicle Dynamics, guess who made that mistake...) made this grille: this grille

Which I kinda like. It's like the same mesh pattern as the OEM but just without the FORD. I can't find the original article but I believe they made laser scans of the oem grille so that they could do it again if need be.

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Meh, I'm not sure if I like that. My favorite part of the Raptor (besides its wide body and unparalleled factory offroad performance) is the giant "FORD" letters on the front. Besides you'd be surprised at how many people even when they see the grill ask me if my Raptor is a Ford lol. Also I just ain't a big fan of honey-comb grills.

The OEM grill is a signature feature of the truck. I've not seen any aftermarket grills that look better than OEM. When you look at all the money spent on mods and posted on this forum, a grill mod is very rare. It's a big part of the Raptor "brand".


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i like the OEM grille alot

i would like to see a company make a grille that looks just like the oem grille but has cutouts with mount tabs for some dually lights

Hurtin_Albertan said:

Meh, I'm not sure if I like that. My favorite part of the Raptor (besides its wide body and unparalleled factory offroad performance) is the giant "FORD" letters on the front.

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I'm not really disagreeing with you, the ICON one above is pretty plain. The one thing I like about the ICON one is that it's machined metal rather than plastic. My Ideal grille would be one that looks like OEM, but metal, and with mounts for lights.

My real point in posting it was to show the approach somebody else took to make a custom grille.

I only add weight increasing items that are functional/performance improvers.

Adding weight for cosmetic ONLY items are not on my list.....

amphibian said:

I'm not really disagreeing with you, the ICON one above is pretty plain. The one thing I like about the ICON one is that it's machined metal rather than plastic. My Ideal grille would be one that looks like OEM, but metal, and with mounts for lights.

My real point in posting it was to show the approach somebody else took to make a custom grille.

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Why metal? Your just gonna cover it with paint anyways.

Maxx2893 said:

Why metal? Your just gonna cover it with paint anyways.

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Just something a bit stiffer that will withstand a bit more abuse, and support some lights was my thinking. Maybe my thinking is too old school and the plastic would work fine, but I just have a bias against plastic i guess.

Fair enough, Thing I don't like about metal is the ability to dent and ding. Where the plastic soaks up impacts, the metal might get little dimple dings in it. The trade of is obviously on larger impacts, the metal will fair much better. Either way, youll probably have to replace, but it may offer better radiator protection.