The bumper looks great, Donovan, nice work! 👍
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BUILD THREAD “The Juggernaut”
- Thread starter Rktpwrd
- Start date
It's not a matter of not having instagram or facebook. It's a matter of not WANTING them. That or any other social-decay media. I don't have time for all that other junk anyway.
Bumper looks good on there, though. Is there any requirements for running a front plate in Canada? If so, they make those little retractable deals that flattens out and stuffs back under the bumper out of sight when not in use. But if there's no requirement for a front plate, then by all means it's good to not have that plate indentation on there.
Bumper looks good on there, though. Is there any requirements for running a front plate in Canada? If so, they make those little retractable deals that flattens out and stuffs back under the bumper out of sight when not in use. But if there's no requirement for a front plate, then by all means it's good to not have that plate indentation on there.
This 100%. I know I miss out on a lot and I'm OK with that. This is an instance where I let my cranky old man side shine.
Thank you Mike, it’s very much appreciated.
Understand completely, believe me. I avoid 99% of that crap too, but Instagram is pretty benign. Just useful for posting pictures and videos so that’s what I do with it.
But that’s not what this update is about, it’s about the insane amount of work and time that has gone into this bumper, and the end result. So I’m going to try and keep it on point here.
Canada is no different than The States in that regard. Some provinces, like some states, require it while others don’t. There is no requirement for one in my province, and hasn’t been for many many years now. Hence my enthusiasm in removing the plate pocket.
Good observation, and thanks for noticing! I’m sure many wouldn’t unless it was pointed out or they really knew these cars inside and out.
Apology declined. Three months of vision, talent and hard work, with results that many of us could not achieve, is more important than daily updates. D, keep up the good work!
That bumper looks right at home and I'm sure it'll fool anyone not familiar with the factory setup and turn signals. Well, at least until they see it from the side- no factory bumper fit that close or that cleanly and the way you've modded the fenders to follow the curvature is a very nice touch. The Euro lights, air inlets, bumper, and fender mods all mesh together well but aren't competing for attention with the hood that we all love, and the many, many hours of hard work and devotion are paying off with crisp, clean lines and panels that fit together like a puzzle. I'm really looking forward to seeing it in color!
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Ok, let’s see if we can’t play a bit of catch up here. This will likely be long winded and with a TON of pictures, so please bear with.
This most recent saga restarted back in April, so that’s where we’ll pick up from. The first order of business was to get rid of all the rust on the backside of the bumper. A lot of it was surface, but a lot of it was also deep pitting. The 3M fibre wheel on the die grinder took care of most of the surface stuff, but removing the pitting required a much more aggressive action.
Every square inch of backside of the bumper got profiled with a 36 grit disc with special emphasis on the pitted areas. The disc was only 2” in diameter, so you can imagine how long that took to accomplish. I chose not to sandblast for various reasons, the least of which was fear of warping it more than it already was, and blow-through in some of the thinner spots.
This grinding step was extremely messy.
Note these two pieces of metal on the floor, these are corroded pieces of the aluminum reinforcement that were starting to delaminate along the edges:
They were no longer really required with this reinvention of the bumper, so off they came.
Once this labor intensive step was completed, the next task was to revisit the hidden fasteners that mount the bumper to the inner reinforcement. I had originally welded in studs in the original carriage bolt holes, but when the nuts were tightened up on the backside, they pulled and puckered the frontside.
Not good.
So after doing some research online to see how others had circumvented this problem, I decided to make six 1/4” rectangular plates that I drilled and tapped for 3/6”-16 1 1/4” long bolts. I cut the heads off the bolts, threaded them in to just below flush, then welded them in the plates. Once all six were made, I next welded the plates to the backside of the bumper inline with the holes in the aluminum reinforcement.
Now I don’t claim to be any sort of a professional welder, but I’m pretty damn sure they ain’t going anywhere. Also note the thin nylon washers on the studs. This is to prevent the accelerated corrosion that can happen from having two dissimilar metals like steel and aluminum in direct contact with one another. These plates and the nylon washers are why the bumper currently sits a half inch farther out than what it should.
Next I started messing around with cleaning up the aluminum reinforcement. It was pretty grubby, but mostly just had some light surface oxidation (other than the delaminated spots I cut off earlier), so I was relatively certain it would clean up well.
About halfway through, I decided that this was just simply too much work to do by hand, and for very little in return. Plus there were going to be several areas that would be nearly impossible to access without great difficulty. Nope, it was eventually going to get dropped off at the powder coaters for bead blasting and powder coat.
So, onto the next. I took the bumper stud to bumper shock plates into work one day, and gave them a thorough sand blasting.
It’s virtually impossible to get the serrated washers that hold the plates to the reinforcement off without destroying them, so I also grabbed some new ones when I stopped by the local auto parts store for some cans of VHT Satin Black spray bombs.
Fast forward a little bit, and I had gotten the reinforcement back from the powder coaters, and it looked great:
Plates painted and installed with the new retainers:
Although I had done a lot of work to this bumper already, I was still pretty green at the time and didn’t know what I didn’t know. Astoundingly, I had never established any center or datum line’s which would make getting reliable measurements nearly impossible. So that was priority one now before the rest of the fabrication could begin.
I started by laying out some strips of 2” bright orange masking tape on the backside to make the datum lines I needed to make clearly visible:
Continued >>>
This most recent saga restarted back in April, so that’s where we’ll pick up from. The first order of business was to get rid of all the rust on the backside of the bumper. A lot of it was surface, but a lot of it was also deep pitting. The 3M fibre wheel on the die grinder took care of most of the surface stuff, but removing the pitting required a much more aggressive action.
Every square inch of backside of the bumper got profiled with a 36 grit disc with special emphasis on the pitted areas. The disc was only 2” in diameter, so you can imagine how long that took to accomplish. I chose not to sandblast for various reasons, the least of which was fear of warping it more than it already was, and blow-through in some of the thinner spots.
This grinding step was extremely messy.
Note these two pieces of metal on the floor, these are corroded pieces of the aluminum reinforcement that were starting to delaminate along the edges:
They were no longer really required with this reinvention of the bumper, so off they came.
Once this labor intensive step was completed, the next task was to revisit the hidden fasteners that mount the bumper to the inner reinforcement. I had originally welded in studs in the original carriage bolt holes, but when the nuts were tightened up on the backside, they pulled and puckered the frontside.
Not good.
So after doing some research online to see how others had circumvented this problem, I decided to make six 1/4” rectangular plates that I drilled and tapped for 3/6”-16 1 1/4” long bolts. I cut the heads off the bolts, threaded them in to just below flush, then welded them in the plates. Once all six were made, I next welded the plates to the backside of the bumper inline with the holes in the aluminum reinforcement.
Now I don’t claim to be any sort of a professional welder, but I’m pretty damn sure they ain’t going anywhere. Also note the thin nylon washers on the studs. This is to prevent the accelerated corrosion that can happen from having two dissimilar metals like steel and aluminum in direct contact with one another. These plates and the nylon washers are why the bumper currently sits a half inch farther out than what it should.
Next I started messing around with cleaning up the aluminum reinforcement. It was pretty grubby, but mostly just had some light surface oxidation (other than the delaminated spots I cut off earlier), so I was relatively certain it would clean up well.
About halfway through, I decided that this was just simply too much work to do by hand, and for very little in return. Plus there were going to be several areas that would be nearly impossible to access without great difficulty. Nope, it was eventually going to get dropped off at the powder coaters for bead blasting and powder coat.
So, onto the next. I took the bumper stud to bumper shock plates into work one day, and gave them a thorough sand blasting.
It’s virtually impossible to get the serrated washers that hold the plates to the reinforcement off without destroying them, so I also grabbed some new ones when I stopped by the local auto parts store for some cans of VHT Satin Black spray bombs.
Fast forward a little bit, and I had gotten the reinforcement back from the powder coaters, and it looked great:
Plates painted and installed with the new retainers:
Although I had done a lot of work to this bumper already, I was still pretty green at the time and didn’t know what I didn’t know. Astoundingly, I had never established any center or datum line’s which would make getting reliable measurements nearly impossible. So that was priority one now before the rest of the fabrication could begin.
I started by laying out some strips of 2” bright orange masking tape on the backside to make the datum lines I needed to make clearly visible:
Continued >>>
Locating the center of the bumper from side to side wasn’t going to be too difficult, but I racked my brain for a while to try and figure out how I was going to find the center top to bottom.
Then it hit me: The aluminum reinforcement.
With the reinforcement in place, it would provide several repeatable and consistent data points that I could establish my measurements from!
I made sure to carefully center the studs in the reinforcement slots…
…then bolted up the reinforcement to the studs and took a measurement from the inside of the driver’s side marker light hole to the inside of the passenger’s:
44 1/2 inches, that put the center line at exactly 22 1/4”. Perfect, one center point established, one to go.
Again using the reinforcement to my advantage, I used the center of the marker light holes top and bottom to establish the longitudinal line:
While all this was fine and dandy, it only allowed me to establish the center lines only on the reinforcement. I needed them on the bumper itself, so how to do that? Enter the laser level.
I had to get creative and stick it to the garage door track overhead so that it would point down directly onto my center lines on the reinforcement:
Well why in the hell would I do that? What’s that going to accomplish? Well, since the reinforcement is smaller than the bumper, wherever the laser lines overlapped onto the bumper would be my lines. Simple and easy, sort of.
But we’ll get to that in a minute.
Here you can clearly see where the laser lines showed up on the bumper, it was now just a matter of tracing them onto the tape with a fine tipped Sharpie.
To get the longitudinal line, I simply attached the laser level to the end of the door track, and centered up the bumper underneath it.
This however, required that the bumper be level on the stand I was working on, so I had to carefully shim it up with some nylon wedges I have:
As with the vertical line, I simply traced the laser lines onto the bumper at the ends of the reinforcement onto the tape. The line is really faint in these pictures, but it’s there.
With the lines transferred onto the bumper around the reinforcement, now the reinforcement had to be removed so that the lines could be connected from end to end, and top to bottom. Because the bumper is curved in both directions, a simple straightedge wasn’t going to be feasible. With the reinforcement removed, I lined up the bumper underneath the laser level and levelled it again.
Perfect, now we just had to trace the laser line directly onto the masking tape.
And there we have it: reliable, accurate datum lines establishing centers. Albeit a little convoluted to achieve, but otherwise impossible. NOW we can start thinking about doing some fabrication!
Continued >>>
Then it hit me: The aluminum reinforcement.
With the reinforcement in place, it would provide several repeatable and consistent data points that I could establish my measurements from!
I made sure to carefully center the studs in the reinforcement slots…
…then bolted up the reinforcement to the studs and took a measurement from the inside of the driver’s side marker light hole to the inside of the passenger’s:
44 1/2 inches, that put the center line at exactly 22 1/4”. Perfect, one center point established, one to go.
Again using the reinforcement to my advantage, I used the center of the marker light holes top and bottom to establish the longitudinal line:
While all this was fine and dandy, it only allowed me to establish the center lines only on the reinforcement. I needed them on the bumper itself, so how to do that? Enter the laser level.
I had to get creative and stick it to the garage door track overhead so that it would point down directly onto my center lines on the reinforcement:
Well why in the hell would I do that? What’s that going to accomplish? Well, since the reinforcement is smaller than the bumper, wherever the laser lines overlapped onto the bumper would be my lines. Simple and easy, sort of.
But we’ll get to that in a minute.
Here you can clearly see where the laser lines showed up on the bumper, it was now just a matter of tracing them onto the tape with a fine tipped Sharpie.
To get the longitudinal line, I simply attached the laser level to the end of the door track, and centered up the bumper underneath it.
This however, required that the bumper be level on the stand I was working on, so I had to carefully shim it up with some nylon wedges I have:
As with the vertical line, I simply traced the laser lines onto the bumper at the ends of the reinforcement onto the tape. The line is really faint in these pictures, but it’s there.
With the lines transferred onto the bumper around the reinforcement, now the reinforcement had to be removed so that the lines could be connected from end to end, and top to bottom. Because the bumper is curved in both directions, a simple straightedge wasn’t going to be feasible. With the reinforcement removed, I lined up the bumper underneath the laser level and levelled it again.
Perfect, now we just had to trace the laser line directly onto the masking tape.
And there we have it: reliable, accurate datum lines establishing centers. Albeit a little convoluted to achieve, but otherwise impossible. NOW we can start thinking about doing some fabrication!
Continued >>>
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In my first bumper post back in April, I mentioned buying a 6’ length of 1” angle iron but never really alluded to what it was going to be for. Long story short, it was destined to create a framework for the Buick Regal marker lights that I’ve been planning on using.
Why Regal lights and not the original Oldsmobile ones?
Simply because with the popularity of Regals and their higher end cousins, the Grand Nationals, the demand and availability is still there for them whereas it’s not with the Oldsmobile ones. Brand new, reproduction bumper marker lights are still available in the aftermarket, and there are lighting upgrades available for them that are not for the Olds lights.
I had purchased two of these aftermarket lights way back when I first started modding the bumper, but had accidentally cracked one and both were looking a little rough after sitting around for some years. So, I bit the bullet and bought 2 new ones again, but set these off to the side for after the fabrication was done. That meant that the older “new” ones were now prime cannon fodder for the many mock-ups that were sure to come.
Back to the angle iron, I carefully measured and cut it up into 8 pieces to create a framework for both lights.
Setting the lights on top of the frameworks gave a good indication of how they’d fit.
At 1” tall, they were obviously too tall so I started whittling them down starting with the ends:
With the ends at the correct elevation to make the lights flush with the face of the bumper, I was next able to make the bottom match.
I couldn’t do the top yet, because with where the lights sit in the bumper, the top half of the framework sits further in than the bottom half. It all has to do with the body line that runs the length of the bumper.
With the bottom pieces cut down and fitting well, they were tacked together and laid inside the bumper:
This kind of gives you an idea of where we’re headed here. A quick test fit of the light into the bottom part of the framework from the front, it should look pretty good:
Now to pare it down a little bit, the face of the framework didn’t need to be an inch wide.
With the width reduced, now I could center up the bottom half of the framework with the previously established center lines to enlarge the opening in the bumper. Then another critical test fit:
Here you can definitely see why the top half of the framework has to be taller (deeper?) than the bottom half.
Time to start fitting the top half, and figure out how I’m going to do it.
Sometimes the best way to figure something out is to just start doing it!
Obviously the magnets were used to keep everything in square. The faces of both the top and bottom, now fully welded in and ground flush:
Continued >>>
Why Regal lights and not the original Oldsmobile ones?
Simply because with the popularity of Regals and their higher end cousins, the Grand Nationals, the demand and availability is still there for them whereas it’s not with the Oldsmobile ones. Brand new, reproduction bumper marker lights are still available in the aftermarket, and there are lighting upgrades available for them that are not for the Olds lights.
I had purchased two of these aftermarket lights way back when I first started modding the bumper, but had accidentally cracked one and both were looking a little rough after sitting around for some years. So, I bit the bullet and bought 2 new ones again, but set these off to the side for after the fabrication was done. That meant that the older “new” ones were now prime cannon fodder for the many mock-ups that were sure to come.
Back to the angle iron, I carefully measured and cut it up into 8 pieces to create a framework for both lights.
Setting the lights on top of the frameworks gave a good indication of how they’d fit.
At 1” tall, they were obviously too tall so I started whittling them down starting with the ends:
With the ends at the correct elevation to make the lights flush with the face of the bumper, I was next able to make the bottom match.
I couldn’t do the top yet, because with where the lights sit in the bumper, the top half of the framework sits further in than the bottom half. It all has to do with the body line that runs the length of the bumper.
With the bottom pieces cut down and fitting well, they were tacked together and laid inside the bumper:
This kind of gives you an idea of where we’re headed here. A quick test fit of the light into the bottom part of the framework from the front, it should look pretty good:
Now to pare it down a little bit, the face of the framework didn’t need to be an inch wide.
With the width reduced, now I could center up the bottom half of the framework with the previously established center lines to enlarge the opening in the bumper. Then another critical test fit:
Here you can definitely see why the top half of the framework has to be taller (deeper?) than the bottom half.
Time to start fitting the top half, and figure out how I’m going to do it.
Sometimes the best way to figure something out is to just start doing it!
Obviously the magnets were used to keep everything in square. The faces of both the top and bottom, now fully welded in and ground flush:
Continued >>>
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