Well,  I pulled the trigger and bought a new winch today – a Kodiak Bruin winch from The Gear Center on the south side.  This is the middle weight of their line, and looks to be a very suitable match for my Rubicon.

It came bundled with a universal mounting plate, and a recovery kit that consists of a tree saver, snatch block, a couple shackles, work gloves, and a bag to carry the stuff in.

I’ve found a couple write-ups on the JK-Forums about installing a winch with the stock bumper – so hopefully it all goes okay!  I’ll try and take some pictures as I go.  One thing I noticed is that this will be a good opportunity to get more of the mud out of the underside from last weekend! :^)

For reference, these threads from the JK-Forum include some write-ups and photos of other folks putting winches onto stock bumpers:

• Factory Bumper Removal
• Help – Winch install on factory bumper
• Superwinch Epi9.0 mounted on Factory Bumper
• remove front bumper cover?

Some folks over at the jk-forum have simply removed the plastic bumper cover, and taken off the crash cans, and one guy then replaced the factory tow hools with shackle mounts from PureJeep. They look pretty good!  Only issue is that the factory fogs don’t mount – so another modification is necessary to resolve that.

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