1964-1974 [Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
I've got a '74 which came with the larger bumpers. It wouldn't be impossible to retrofit them, but it would take a certain amount of welding and cutting, which you probably wouldn't want to do to your small-bumper car if it's in nice shape.
Basically, the way the mounting worked on the big-bumper cars is that the bumpers mount on two long sections of approx. 1 x 1-1/2" rectangular tubing that attach along the sides of the engine bay and run forward a couple of feet. You'd have to cut two rectangular holes in the fiberglass nose of the car for these tubes to pass through.
The actual mounting of the bumpers is straightforward -- they have short tabs that run back from the backing plate, and each tab has a cylindrical bushing with a hole crossways through it. The tabs and bushings are of a size that slip-fits snugly inside the tubes. With the tab inserted into the tube, a bolt goes through the tube and through the hole in its bushing to hold the bumper in place.
So, it wouldn't be too tough if you're good at cutting, welding, and measuring to make sure everything matches up. But are you sure you really want to do it?
Yes, the big bumpers do help protect the fiberglass a bit in the event of a straight-on bump. For example, once I was parking my car inside a parking garage, and I misjudged the distance a bit and bumped one of the concrete columns that held up the roof. On a small-bumper car, it would have been the front edge of the hood that took the hit; in my car, the bumper took it. I was only going about 3 mph, so there was no damage.
BUT... the problem with the way the big bumpers are mounted is that in a higher-speed impact, they can really mess up the car. Because the mounting tubes are so long, and don't have any support until all the way back at the engine bay, a moderately hard whack on one corner of the bumper can skew the whole thing sideways. This had happened to my car sometime in its past, and whoever had repaired it had done a really sloppy job -- when I got it, I discovered that the whole front section of the sheet metal was lozenged. That section includes the two reinforced channels where the front engine mounts rest, so my engine was torqued to one side about 3/4 inch! This caused a lot of weird driveline symptoms, in addition to cosmetic annoyances such as the nose not sitting straight on the car. Eventually I was able to remove the nose and straighten the metal using a hydraulic ram, but it was a big job!
On a small-bumper car, the same impact probably would have demolished the fiberglass nose, but then you'd just have to hunt up a replacement nose and you'd be all set. That's the real drawback of the big-bumper cars, IMO -- they give better protection in very low-speed impacts, but at anything above that, they can actually make the damage worse!
It's your call, just be aware that there's a downside...
posted by 24.252.59...
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