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Front Bumper & Brackets

Temps here were near zero earlier in the week (Xmas) but now they are in the 50s and 60s so time to get a few things done. I'm also battling a cold but I hate to let my week off go without hitting a lick on the project so I thought I'd sort out the front bumper and brackets in the time remaining.

First I had to put in the old front grille and dig out the old bumper brackets. I also had a repro filler panel and chrome bumper that came with the truck that I could possibly use. After mounting the grille and digging out the old brackets and mounting them on the frame it was pretty evident that one of the brackets (LH) was mangled quite a bit. A closer look at it and it looked like the damage was confined to the inner/center bracket...the outer bracket looked ok. Since I was going to have to modify the brackets anyway I decided to see if I could salvage these brackets instead of fabbing new ones from scratch.

I removed 4” out of the back bumper so I figured that I was going to want to shorten the front bumper as well. I set the bumper on top of the brackets and determined that I needed to remove 3” from the front bumper to tuck it in to the fender. It also looked like I should also move the bumper back about an inch as well. So I cut a 3” section out of the center of the bumper and welded it back together to start the build.

After the bumper was the shortened I went ahead and split both of the stock two-piece bumper brackets by removing the rivet so I could at least use the outer portion. I then mounted the outer portion of the brackets to the frame to see how things aligned with the shortened bumper. Of course they did not align but it did allow me to verify that I did need to pull the bumper in an inch.

I removed the brackets and then shortened them 1” in the fore/aft direction to pull the bumper back closer to the grille. I then remounted the shortened outer brackets and bolted up one side of the bumper to see how far the other side was misaligned so I could shorten the brackets in the L/R direction. With the bumper shortened 3” and removing the inner bracket from the stock set my measurements showed that I needed to remove 2-1/4” total, so I needed to remove 1-1/8” on each bracket. I then cut both sides and shortened them to align to the existing carriage bolt holes and temp mounted the bumper to the shortened brackets using the carriage bolts.

Like I said, one of the inner brackets was significantly bent and I could not use it but luckily I could use the slotted end portion that mounted to the bumper so I cut off about 2” of that area on both brackets and fastened it to the existing holes in the bumper so I could measure and fit a new piece of 1/4x1-1/2” bar that I had bought. After it was cut to fit I tacked the new metal piece in place, I then removed the brackets and did the final weld and grinding on these brackets and reinstalled it all back onto the truck to make sure it all still fit properly.

With the brackets completed and bumper fitted the next task was to cut the heads off the carriage bolts and weld them flush into the bumper opening to smooth out the look. The next task will be to fab a new front bumper filler to match the new bumper geometry.