ERRORIK"Z BLOG: The Rear Bumper

My rear bumper got messed up. See below. The damage occurred when I hit a freeway wall.

First step, find a new bumper. The new bumper from Ferrari cost $3,490.00 each !!!! Wah, tai gui leh. And that's not even including installation and paint and tax and shipping charges. Total price of about $6000 at least.

But I was lucky enough to find a used bumper on ebay. This bumper came from a race car on the Ferrari Race team. So it is a little beat up because I guess the cars get hit all the time. But on the plus side, it is made out of a special type of fiberglass so it is a little bit lighter. The original bumper weighs about 35 pounds. The challenge race bumper weighs less than 15 pounds. Not too much, but people sometimes pay a lot of money to save that much weight, and I'm saving money by choosing this bumper! How much? This bumper only costs $800. No tax, and $150 to ship to me.

First step: repair all the cracks. I used fiberglass to do this. There are 2 types of fiberglass, the cat-hairball type and the cloth type. I used the cat hairball type because girls think the name sounds cute.

This is the crack I'm fixing from the outside. All I did was put some tape over the outside, that way the fiberglass has something to mold against as I push it from the back.

This is the crack I'm fixing from the inside. It's really messy. This is because I'm not too good at working with fiberglass.

Here is the mounted bumper without paint. I thought it'd be fun to drive around with the race car look for awhile! Haha, I think it looks pretty cool, but The Da Da made me change it. Haha.

So. Now, the next step was to add the license plate lights. This was kind of hard, but boring, so I didn't take any pictures and I'll try not to talk about it too much. I just cut some holes in the bumper with a drill and ran the cord through.

And then I removed all the stickers. I put them up on my wall to remind me. That was the easy part. What comes next was very hard work and time consuming.

First, I had to fill in all the holes with Bondo body filler. and then sand it down flush. Some of the holes came from the lap time transponder, which tells a computer how fast you drove. And the other hold came from the tow hook mount.