After sitting so long I finally decided to see what it would take to swap out the bumpers on the Monte Carlo. What's wrong with the bumper you ask? Well a few years ago the ole lady's old car she USED to have pretty much blew up in the driveway due to a strange short circuit malfunction, who the hell knows, but either way this car made of mostly plastic and aluminum and other nice hot burning shit fried itself pretty good. And it did so only a few feet away from the ass end of the Monte. Luckily the ole lady and our neighbor were able to quench the fire before it had a chance to take out the Monte all together, especially since the fuel filler tube is in the back of the car. Despite their efforts the rear bumper was melted part way to the point that its pretty much not repairable. Fast forward some and I managed to find a replacement bumper, well really this is a bumper cover. The 80's was a decade of transitioning over to more and more plastic on cars and going away from the chrome bumpers of the 70's and before. So I have this bumper skin that is complete but a little worse for wear. It will obviously need to be sanded and prepped up in order to be repainted to match the rest of the car. The bumper cover came with the license plate frame, also plastic, but damaged some. So with that, time to go to work. I had to get under the rear of the car in order to snake my hand behind the bumper cover to access the multiple cap nuts that were used to hold the bumper cover onto the car. I also had to remove the spring loaded license plate holder and the cap nuts holding the license plate mount in place. After playing around with these stupid little fuckers I was able to get the bumper cover finally removed. At first I was worried that I might have to try to fix the damaged license plate frame on the replacement bumper since I got it all together. After examination I found I could break the two down so I went ahead and swapped the old license plate frame to the new bumper cover before starting the reassembly. As with most things the reassembly went in reverse of the disassembly. I still had to snake my hands under and behind the bumper cover to get the cap nuts in place, having to omit a few due to distortion that caused them to not grab the shitty threads of the studs that were in place. Since this is a 30+ year old car, most of these types of fittings are degraded where the threads are shitty at best and nonexistent at worst. I managed though and was able to get more than enough cap nuts in place to get the bumper cover installed and the license plate frame secured and the spring license plate mount attached. With that the bumper is in place.
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