I was parked in my parents' driveway over Christmas 2002 and my
dad hit it on his way out. All the little lines you see are cracks
in my paint, surrounded by white scratches. Bleh. My only consolation
is that aside from cosmetics, my car only suffered minor damage
while my dad's Mercedes suffered over $2000 in damage. It's good
to know that my Japanese parts would be much cheaper and that I
could do the fix myself...
Here's a close up of the end of the bumper
where it's separating from the wheel well. The collision knocked the
right side off one of it's supports and bent some of the connection
points. With a little wiggling and pushing and pulling, I got the
bumper to pop back onto it's support but the edge s still bent a little
out of shape. Here you can see that the point where the bumper has
pulled away from the rest of the car by about 1/8 inch.
Since I took
off the bumper cover to clear my headlights, I had a chance
to inspect the internal bumper damage a little more closely. Here
is a picture of the bumper support on the driver's side which is
normal.
Here is a picture of the passenger side
support. As you can see it's bent inward. You can see where the paint
on the edges is peeling and rusting. I decided not to bend the support
back as re-bending it may weaken it more. However, I did brush off
some of the peeling paint and rust and gave it a quick coat of Rust-O-Leum.
Here is a picture of the bumper cover
supports. On the right is the normal driver's side and the damaged
one is on the left. The three left arrows point at three bent tabs
hold the bumper cover. The fourth arrow shows how the overall piece
is bent and no longer smooth.
With the help of a pair of pliers, I bent the tabs back to their correct
positions.
Here is another angle of the supports.
Here you can see the bend in the piece better. If you notice, the
normal piece on the bottom has a nice rectangular hole but the damaged
one on the top is angled from the bend.
With a hammer, I banged some of the bends out and straightened the
support as best as possible.
Now that it is all back together, it looks
a little bit better than before. You can't really tell that it was
damaged (except for the peeling paint on the front) and internally
it's in better shape than before.
