67 Mustang bolt holes bumper repair

Good eeevening! (imagine Dracula)! ; )

IT was really difficult to come up with a title for this little repair! So I asked Shaun the Sheep to look into it for me. He came up with the title, not me! ; )  I love Shaun the Sheep!

This blog is about repairing the nuts in the frame which hold the bumpers to the frame. Luckily, it was only the passenger side that had this problem, but for a visual, think the passenger side now. Below is the driver’s side.  Oh, I don’t have this ugly suspension anymore~ that looks nasty!

Now luckily for me (I’m a lucky girl!), I had to replace the entire radiator support~ the entire support! And let me tell you~ it’s a PITA to get out!  After removing the radiator support/cross member, I gained access to the front of the frame.

Well, this is what held the bumper brackets on~ eek!

Notice the black hole towards the left and the broken off bolt to the right?

I took a big hammer and a punch and knocked the front broken off nut completely through. Now I have two great big holes with nothing to hold my bumper brackets too!  At first I was thinking to just drill through and  put long bolts through the frame, but that might smush the frame and then the bumper would be flopping in the breeze!

Just kidding~ I can fix anything! I took a piece of flat bar that I just happen to have lying around my garage floor, found a couple 7/16″ nuts~

And welded them to the flat bar with my smallest mig welder, as I have a 135 amp mig, and a Systematics 175 kick ass mig too!

Then I made a hole in front of the frame, well actually that’s what I would have had to do, but I had the front frame off as I was replacing the entire radiator support, so that wasn’t an issue, but I could have taken a cut off wheel and made an access hole just large enough to slide my little repair Nut-bar to be welded in place.  And don’t worry, I sandblasted this area and looked very nice when I was done. 😉

If I hadn’t been able to repair that one area~ I wouldn’t have been able to have a nice looking front fiberglass bumper~ now we couldn’t have that!

Sometimes through the restoration process, little things like (or large problems) this are encountered and common sense has to come in to play! Common sense is kind of disappearing these days, kids don’t hang out with the parents to learn like I did when I was a kid, but they sure know how to text! ; )

I hope this may help if you run into this problem~ please subscribe to my blog and follow along~ I’ll try to make it fun and a learning process as well!  ; ) dne’