BUILD THREAD “The Juggernaut”

[Rktpwrd]

I kind of lapsed in my documentation of the process, but here are the pictures of the finished framework on the face of the bumper.

It’s little difficult to describe, but basically the ends of the framework were made to fit by making relief cuts on the backside and bending the face to match the curvature of the bumper. Then the relief cuts were welded up again. Once that was done, I then knew the depth the top half of the framework had to be. It was cut down to match the lower half, thereby making a level mounting surface for the light.

Now we need to have a way of mounting the lights to the bumper. Just like I did with the bumper plates and studs, I drilled and tapped holes through the face of the bumper, cut some studs, and welded them in place.

One side figured out, now onto the other. I learned quite a bit on this first side, thankfully the driver’s side went quite a bit quicker and smoother.

Both marker light openings now completed, and the new set of non-mockup lights installed:

But we ain’t done with the fabrication yet, oh no, not by a long shot.

The top outer edges on both sides weren’t in the best of shape, they had been warped and distorted by me trying to hammer and dolly them into shape. If I had a Pullmax machine with custom made dies in the proper shape I could’ve fixed them, but since I don’t, the next best course of action was to cut them off entirely and replace them with two new good ones from one of the donor bumpers.

It’s a little difficult to tell here, but in these pictures I’ve overlaid the old warped pieces onto the replacements. They had definitely lost a lot of their shape:

Back on the car for another test fit, looks pretty good, but more tweaking was going to be in order.

I had purposely left the inner edges on both sides long so that when I mocked it up on the car, I would know exactly where to notch them to go around the bumper filler panel.

As you can see by my marks, I’ve allowed for a 1/4” gap around it:

I enjoy this picture, symmetry and flow is important when custom designing and building things. Note how all three things, the lights, the air intake, and the new marker light are all stacked creating a pleasing visual effect:

With things starting to progress pretty nicely at this point, it was now time to address something that had been plaguing me the entire time on this:

The bumper had slowly developed a nasty twist in it over time, presumably due to all the welding and related heat that goes with it. The end caps that are supposed to fit snugly into their pockets in each fender were not square and level in them.

I had to (un)do the twist so to speak.

Since leverage is your friend, and with a fulcrum and a long enough lever you can move the world, this was going to be the answer as to how to fix this.

It was redneck and backyard as all hell, but I clamped one end cap of the bumper to my workbench, and a long length of square tubing to the other while supporting the middle with my stand.

An inclinometer and a couple of digital angle gauges kept an eye on things, and let me know when I had provided the right amount of leverage to reverse the twist. It had developed a 5 degree twist into it, and by the time I was done correcting it, I had it down to 0.1 of a degree. Easily correctable with shim plates when the bumper is installed if necessary.

Continued >>>

 

[Rktpwrd]

In my haste to replace the upper outer pieces, I unfortunately kind of inadvertently made more work for myself. I hadn’t paid attention to the angles of the edges in relation to the air intake screens, and after yet another mock-up it became painfully obvious:

I needed to remove nearly 3/8” of material from the inner areas to bring the edges into alignment. Here it is outlined in masking tape:

Once cut, then moved into place leaving a very small point of material to act as a pivot.

I really thought at the time that this was the best course of action, but I was to later find out that I was very, very wrong. More on that later.

With the passenger side moved into its corrected position, a comparison to the driver’s side makes it pretty obvious why it had to be corrected. Look at the gap between the top of the bumper and the bottom of the air intake screens in these next two pictures:

And of course, the other side had to be corrected in the same manner.

Starting to tack weld them into their corrected positions now. I’ll skip over the fully welding them in and grinding them flush, as my documentation started to fall off a little bit at this point anyways. I was starting to get a little overwhelmed at the amount of fabrication that this was requiring, I didn’t anticipate it to be anywhere near this much when I started.

One thing I do want to cover though, is the correction of the top of the driver’s side end cap. I had completed this modification on the passenger’s side many years back when I was first working on the bumper, but had never repeated the procedure on the driver’s side.

This is the passenger’s side, the top of the end cap follows the side profile of the header panel and fender perfectly:

And the required matching profile on the driver’s side for comparison as indicated by the masking tape:

So how did I do it? Follow along in this progression of pictures to see.

Continued >>>

 

[Rktpwrd]

It was about now that the very special delivery I had been waiting on for several weeks had finally arrived. I mentioned that there were lighting upgrades available for the Regal lights, and mine came in the form of some digital amber sequential LED’s from DigiTails.

After modifying the new light housings to accept the DigiTail LED boards, I tested them out on the bench before sealing them up permanently. Another Instagram video, these things are BRIGHT!!

View this content on Instagram

View this content on Instagram

I can’t wait to see these installed in the bumper and working on the car. They should look amazing and update the look considerably.

Back to fabrication. 🥵

Although I had completed the work on the passenger’s side marker light, I wasn’t at all happy with the area directly below it. I think I may have rushed the welding part of it, because the area below the light was pretty badly distorted and warped. No amount of hammering and dollying was going to straighten out what was there.

So, back to the donor bumper, and cut out the required section. Again, because of my lack of documentation, I only have the one picture of it. The bottom is already fully welded in and ground flush, with just the top section left to go:

I slowed right down and took my time this time, making sure not to weld in any one particular area for too long, quench after every tack, and mind the heat from grinding. It turned out MUCH better, with nearly zero distortion.

Remember that top outer edge on the passenger’s side that I had to cut and move after welding it on? Well it was time for round three. Why? I’ll be dammed if I know, but somehow between mockups and fabrication, the gap ended up not being the same as the driver’s side. Was it because of shims I had installed to level out the end caps? Did something move or twist on me somehow throughout the process?

I still don’t know to this day.

But they say the third time’s the charm, so for the THIRD time I cut it out and repositioned it.

Again, this time I slowed right down and made especially sure that all my measurements were bang on and accurate, and that nothing moved around on me while welding it all back together. Thankfully, this time it’s perfect.

I now have exactly 5/8 of an inch of gap consistently across the width of the intake screens, on both sides. This measurement will decrease to 1/8 of an inch once I have the aluminum bumper shock substitutes shortened by the required half inch. Should look great, exactly where I want it.

And that finally gets us pretty much up to date. There’s a couple of other things I didn’t mention like the multitude of test fits and mockups, or the tweaking of the end caps to fit perfectly without the use of bumper shim plates, but believe it or not that was actually the abbreviated version.

It’s been a helluva long 3 months of thrashing away on this thing, but hopefully the effort will be worth it in the end. Now we start filler and bodywork on it to make all that effort look pretty.

Thanks for following along guys, I know it was an awful lot.

D.

 

[old80cs]

That turned out to be an enormous undertaking, Donovan, glad you persevered and got it the way you wanted. Very nice fabricating job, and the LED directionals, I’m sure, will add to it in the end! 👍

 

[mclellan83]

After literally months and months of fabrication, cutting, welding, grinding, test fitting, tweaking, reworking, modifying, adjusting, and countless other things, all the fabrication on the front bumper is finally done.

Still have to get the aluminum bumper shock substitutions shortened a half inch and welded back together again, but at least now I can start on the filler and bodywork process.

Video on Instagram:

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View this content on Instagram

Don’t have Instagram? It should still be visible. Otherwise, too bad, suck it up buttercup. It’s the 21st century, time to get with the times.
🤣🤣🤣

For those of you who miss my old school long update posts, I’ll do one of those too, but it’s going to take some time. I literally have 3 months worth of pictures, work, procedures, and modifications done to it to cover. And with me working on it nearly every day over those 3 months, trust me - it’s a lot.

D.

I had just been thinking about that over the weekend and then saw your IG post, I said to myself did I get banned from the thread!?!?!?!? Hahaha glad to see all the awesomeness again

 

[oldsofb]

 

[Rktpwrd]

That turned out to be an enormous undertaking, Donovan, glad you persevered and got it the way you wanted. Very nice fabricating job, and the LED directionals, I’m sure, will add to it in the end! 👍

Thank you Mike, I appreciate the kind words. I’m finally happy with the way it’s coming together. But it’s been a struggle for sure.

I had just been thinking about that over the weekend and then saw your IG post, I said to myself did I get banned from the thread!?!?!?!? Hahaha glad to see all the awesomeness again

Haha, nope you didn’t get banned from the thread, it was just me procrastinating on updating it. But I didn’t want to post until I actually had something to show for all the effort that went into it.
Glad you’re enjoying the progress.

Gif for a gif…

 

[Rktpwrd]

Back on it again today as it’s our national holiday here.

Pulled the bumper back off the car and put it on the stand again, separated the reinforcement from the bumper, then cut down the mounting plate studs.

Now that I know I’ll no longer need the additional length for bumper shims, there’s no reason they need to be an inch and a half long. I’ve gotta say, these little devils are some extremely tough little bastards. I’ve had this bumper on and off so many times, and have adjusted it and cranked down on these studs so many times, and they’ve taken everything I can throw at them.

It was almost a shame to cut them down.

Next I engraved the ends of the aluminum bumper shock substitutes for driver’s and passenger’s sides, then marked the amount of material that needs to be removed from each one for the welding shop. I’m going to trust them with cutting and removing the correct amount of material from each one and then TiG them back together again.

Hopefully I can get these to them sometime this week.

While I had the reinforcement separated from the bumper, I took this one last opportunity to do a little more hammering on it. The bottom edge (that nobody will ever see) wasn’t quite straight and required some loving with the body hammer.

These two pictures are from before I started, with the straightedge to show the amount it needed to be moved to become straight.

And now after the straightening, I simply put the bumper on the floor and used it as my anvil.

Much better.

With that, the very last of the hammer and dolly work has been completed. Now we’re officially onto the filler work. That commenced with a little bit of long strand fibreglass filler on the backside in a couple of key areas that either had voids, or where the material was very thin.

The idea here is not necessarily to make it look pretty (although it will definitely look presentable when I’m done), but rather to strengthen the thin areas and waterproof it. I definitely don’t want that rust returning on the backside.

This will get sanded, then eventually the entire backside will get shot with epoxy primer and topcoated with Raptor Liner. But that will likely happen after the bodywork is completed on the frontside just in case I have to work any areas a little more.

Onto the next stage!

D.

 

[Streetbu]

Awesome work D!

 

[pagrunt]

I'd have to bust out the Play Doh to make a bumper with those clean curves & bends.