On Monday evenings I go to the "paint your own car" class at the school. This gives me another 4 hours a week to get work done, only draw back is it's in a different shop. So instead of working on the car itself I have some individual body parts over there that I work on.
This past Monday I worked on the front bumper. Mine is pretty rotted on the passenger side, you can see the floor through it! The rest of the rust is surface rust, which will be taken care of during sandblasting.
As I mentioned before, I picked up a wrecking yard bumper from an 85 Cutlass Supreme to get mine back in shape. The 85 bumper has different body lines on the top so the plan was to cut the bottom half out and graft it into mine. Nice thing about the later model bumper is that it has the turn signals in the bumper rather than near the headlights like mine. These will become functional brake cooling ducts.
First thing I did was using the plasma cutter I cut out a larger than needed patch area.
The turn signal openings are huge and would look out of proportion with my single compared to the 85 dual headlights, so I narrowed them by 4.5" where the weld line is. Here's a mock up of where they will go.
I then cut out a large rectangle from my bumper and also narrowed it 1" above the left side cut line to tuck it in close to the body. The weld has already been ground down in this shot. I then trimmed the new piece to fit and tacked it in.
Here's a couple shots of what it will look like on the car. I'll finish welding and get the other side done next week.
