'83 Cutlass Cruiser Build Thread

Thanks Jack!
The original Texas bumpers on the car were super clean!
The rear bumper was laser straight with zero rust, but the chrome was faded and peeling badly.
The rear reinforcement was so clean that I just wiped the dirt off of it and I got a new bumper from RockAuto last spring for $200.

The '83 front bumper went to Jim and he cut it up for his car...

The '78 front bumper I have for my car now came from Rohner's and was pretty crusty in between the pieces, especially where the aluminum reinforcement was tight against the steel bumper. There were only two spots to straighten and luckily there weren't any holes.
Since they don't reproduce the front bumpers, I had no other choice than to have mine re-chromed.
It was more than I wanted to spend, but there was no way I could put a faded used bumper on the car next to that nice new paint! lol

Spent some time last week getting the back-sides of the bumper painted, along with all of the hardware I had previously cleaned up.
Just waiting on a warm sunny day to finish cleaning up the reinforcement and get some sealer on it...
Then I can put it all back together!

I snapped a better pic while I was at it...

I'm just glad it went to good use, Jim!
The only reason I hadn't already scrapped it was because it was frozen into the bed of my truck! lol

The weather forecast is finally starting to look more like real spring and not just shitty Minnesota spring, so I'll try to get the bumper reinforcement finished up this weekend.
And even better, I've got the whole week off next week, so hopefully l can knock out a bunch of the little stuff left on the list...

My week of vacation is off to a great start! The weather forecast looks beautiful all week, so I scored!

Friday I drilled a hole in my bumper shocks to see if I could get them to move... No dice.
So I threw one in a vice and got it to move about 1/2", so I'll either have to get creative or take them to the machine shop...

Yesterday I gave the front bumper reinforcement a nice acid bath and threw a quick coat of rattle can primer on it.
I know, not the ideal process, but I'm lazy and it's invisible and I had already exceeded how much effort I wanted to put into it.
It looks fine.

And today I put everything for the front bumper together into a complete assembly.
Cleaned up the rub-strip with some Mother's Back-to-Black and it looks decent if you don't look too hard lol.
I'm happy with the results and I'll be even happier when it's back on the car!