Bumper Repair Question

[Brandon J]

I was wondering if it's possible to repair ripples or waves in the factory rear bumper. It's not that bad, but you know - what it looks like when the bumper bounces back after something hits it.

Okay... the story even though it's not really exciting...

I was backing out from a parking place yesterday when somebody decided they wanted to zip around me. I was going really slow and they didn't go around quite far enough and the driver's side corner of the bumper got hit (on the pass. side rear bumper of their CRV or whatever). Mine had a dent in it but I reached around and pushed it out. So now there's some scratches and messed up paint on that area of my bumper along with a stripe on the tail light.

Not enough for us to mess with insurance, and both of us messed up anyway (and his car only had a scratch anyway).

...So now I'm looking at fixing or replacing the bumper and replacing the tail light.

[Camry2000]

Bondo does wonders. :)

[Brandon J]

Thanks... I didn't know if bondo would stick to the plastic on the bumper (or the paint that's still there on my bumper) or not. It doesn't look like they primed it at the factory, and I'm not familiar with painting on plastic.

I just don't want it all to come peeling off in a few months like what happened on my mom's Nissan. That's got me really worried there. But the spots with no paint are thin scratches instead of like her car where they tried to paint a bumper that was bare to begin with.

[Camry2000]

What you do is sand the paint off and clean it as best as you can with alcohol. I prefer to work with fiber glass bondo as it is stronger than normal bondo. Mix a small batch and apply in thin layers. Sand and repaint.

Fiber glass bondo sticks to plast extremely well. I used it to make a custom gauge pod. I used fiber glass bondo to flush moun the gauge pod onto my plastic A-pillar.

http://condor.depaul.edu/~thong/custom_pod.jpg

[Brandon J]

Nice work there! The gauges look really sharp.

I'd do it myself if I had the time to. Things at work are getting ready to go crazy next week and I allready have three projects at home that I'm trying to finish up as soon as posible. Also the tools here are sort of lacking (I moved yesterday). So it looks like I get to take her on in somewhere.

But I'm definately going somewhere where there's a warranty of some sort and I know what to look for with the fiberglass bondo.