Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Chrome bumpers are important to a classic car’s looks. Rusted or bent up they can detract from nice paintwork. The ones on my TR6 were passable–not superb but not so bad that I should be arrested for putting them on a restored car.

The chrome portions (excluding license-plate light fixture) came in three or four pieces, depending on year. Mine are the 4-piece ones with “overriders,” which keep a vehicle in front of behind from riding over the cross-piece and taking out your grille or denting your tail panel at parking speeds.

The back bumper needs to rejoin the car but I’d taken one of the side pieces off to facilitate removal. Looking at it now I realized the mounting bolts were bent. Tracking down a new bracket, to which the three bolts are welded, was one option. But shouldn’t we be able to fix this?

Step one was to hold the bolt tight in a vise. An adjustable wrench, positioned at the bend, would provide our leverage.

Cranking only on the bent portion put things back pretty close to straight. Sure, it also smushed the threads some, but naturally we’d be chasing the threads anyway.
A quick cleanup with the tap & die set yielded perfectly useable results.

And remember kids, do try this at home–when things get bent out of shape. There’s a rubber piece that goes in there that maybe we could have made, but I was passing by Quality Coaches, a Moss Distributor, so I ordered one up for the bumper sections and for underneath the license-plate light fixture.

More bumper work to come…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Car parts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.