Taco2Cruiser
Crazy American Off Road
Yeah i'm with you on Riv Nuts. Where I loose my mind on them is when they loose their grip with the metal that they grip around, and you are left with a spinning bolt and nut that has to be cut off, then you loose the riv nut in the frame rail... which just bothers me. I removed a slider about a month ago that was held on with those things and yeah, spinning riv-nut.
Anyway, aluminum "sliders." We run some very... very high quality aluminum materials that react very nicely when welded that allows for polishing as well as eliminates corrosion naturally, it also has a higher weight to strength ratio than what most people use. It's much harder to work with but hey... we got Bud with his military aircraft engineering background and Will who was formally educated by the military to weld aircraft aluminum, so it’s doable. But honestly, aluminum as a slider just don’t hold up well to rock dragging. Aluminum just galls too much. People think it gets deep scratches, no, it’s actually peeling itself away due to its low lubricity properties. You can get away with aluminum on skids simply because there is so much more area to impact. So the odds of you hitting the same spot over and over and over are far less which basically spreads out the beating. But on sliders, you really only have a small, regularly impacted area, and it doesn’t take long before you just start to wear through that area.
As @mcgaskins said, the real weight difference sometimes is not much, it all depends on how much material is used. Aluminum is light, but you have to use more of it to make it the strength of steel (generally). Now just for our steel sliders they weight about the same as what else is out there. They are just more support than the rest to minimize deflection and bending.
77 pounds with full dimple die plates. The extra weight of BudBuilts is in the massive 3/8” inner frame plates and 5/8” bolts that give one hell of a solid mounting design. So is a weight penalty of not having to use riv-nuts worth it? That’s not for me to decided, but I just like to give the info, and let people make their best educated determination based on their needs.
BudBuilts are pretty overly tough, @mcgaskins showed a video of Slee sliders, however (sorry Matt) that was a pretty weak impact. But... for most guys, @sleeoffroad are probably up to the task for what guys are doing. Plus you can get Slee sliders like, immediately. When I bought my Slee sliders before I moved back to east coast, where I reconnected with Bud, Christo had those things to my door in like, 4 days. Pretty dang good if you ask me.
BudBuilts are just more about customizing and hardcore wheeling protection. Hell, we have over 150 different combinations you can make a 200 slider in on the website. If we made only one option like Slee, yeah, that would be too easy to stock. But we don’t, we let people put their own spin on it, and thusly, we have to build everything to order. And that’s the issue, we make everything ourselves, in house, so we can make those tweaks easier than companies that have other shops build their armor. One is not right and one is not wrong, just two different ways of doing things based off what these personalities want.
When it comes to overlanding use, you can’t go wrong with almost any slider available for the 200 (except for two, one is viper and the other I can’t say who it is, but damn, it’s a joke). But BudBuilt, Slee, Trail Taylor, White Knuckle to say a few all have good options, and some are just better for some people’s intent (strength or looks) than others are. No harm done, just how it works.
For our protection rail, it’s basically really good for bottoming out protection, like that video showed, it’s just offers no “lay up against a tree” protection as it doesn’t stick out enough. It does weight about 25 pounds less per side. Email me and I can get you some higher quality pictures than what’s on my phone right now.
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