The front panel is the body part pictured above, that runs between the two front fenders and beneath the grille. The front bumper mounts poke out through the holes on either side.
The front panel is mounted to each fender with four bolts/nuts (which are a huge pain to remove if you don't have the car up on a lift, due to tight quarters). Another bolt on each side passes through the shell and is held with a nut held down by a clip (seen just above and to the left of the leftmost of the four bolts pictured). These clips, naturally, gave up the ghost and began letting the square nut spin - so they had to go, and vice grips attached to hold that nut steady as the bolt was removed.
One more bolt, right in the middle, needs to come off.
And then, a bit of wiggling (to loosen up the rubber seals between front panel and fenders) and the panel is free.
The seals between the front panel and the fenders. From the illustration in the old dealer parts book, I'm guessing these pieces originally came straight. I'm going to hold onto these seals, to use as patterns in case I need to use something different as a workable replacement.
The last bits to come off are these pieces, one on each side. I'm unsure at the moment what they're for - I'm guessing as supports for the front panel. I'm not finding them in the old parts book PDF where the front panel is listed.
Now I can easily remove the bumper mounts. Each one is held with a pair of 17mm bolts. These come loose with a sufficient application of penetrant and oomph.
Bumper mounts removed. Note the left one is missing the part pointing toward the bottom of the photo - this part broke away when I first removed the front bumper. And the right mount is bent in somewhat in about the same spot. I'm guessing at some point in the distant past, the bumper took a fairly good hit, and the mounts took a fair amount of the impact, bending in the process. I'm going to look into replacing both - the left mount out of necessity, the right out of caution.
No comments:
Post a Comment