Hi all,

I have 1995 N Reg Biography in Epsom Green with painted bumpers. I really need to add parking sensors preferably front and rear that blend in hopefully unnoticeable.

Please has anyone fitted to painted bumpers and can recommend. I only need bleeping sensors as I have to park at my local train station in some via tight on-road parking.

I am easily able as an engineer to drill holes and wire up electrics if anyone can recommend a good supplier.

kind regards
Neil

i looked into replacing mine , they are readily available on e bay or you could go for a reverse camera

I've bought a couple of these for different cars https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/-/142316341015? they are dead easy to fit and work perfectly. Although there doesn't appear to be a decent match for Epson Green.

Please do these cheap sensors fit into a painted P38 bumper front and back

cheers
Neil

Depends where you want to fit them. If I was going to fit some, I'd put them in the lower section, below the actual bumper part. They fit into a 21mm hole but the same company does some smaller (18mm I think) ones too.

Fronts I don't know/ don't have. The rear bumper is an ABS skin over a steel bumper. You will need to drill into both, therefore. For the steel, something like one of those conical drills works quite well. Where you need to drill both layers will be slightly curved, not difficult, but just so you know, as it means you wont get an exact circle. You don't need to remove the bumper, indeed I probably recommend you don't if your bumper hasn't been off for some time. Then thread the wires through the holes/ fit the sensors to the bumper. The wires on mine then go up into the spare wheel well, where they're plugged into the controller, and link up to the speaker provided
On Richard's point, if you can get 18mm rather than 21mm I probably would, just for ease of fitting.

Fabulous idea, 18mm it will be and slightly lower at the front, maybe even rear as our bumpers are above most others bumpers, especially where the tow hook is concerned.

lets see if I can find 18mm in Epsom green - Wish me luck
cheers
Neil

I fitted a Maplin kit shortly after getting the car. Put the sensors in a row down the middle of the bumper to be sure that there were no issues with scattering off nearby parts of the car. A friend decided to go all neat with his installation and put the sensors under the bumper so the back face of the bumper was a little behind the sensor. To his surprise and my non surprise the darn things saw the bumper and just wailed all the time. Ended up making little pods for them with short shielding lips. Many of the cheap aftermarket sensors are partially recessed to avoid similar problems.

Naturally another mate did a similar just below and behind the bumper installation with a different kit on a different vehicle with no problems.

I ran the sensor wires up through the long tailed "grommet" running up through the floor close to the right hand rear lights. Its a bit of a squeeze and you have to take the grommet out so it hangs down below the car. I taped my wires together in a staggered arrangement so only one plug was going through the grommet at a time. Put one section of my glass fibre rod cable puller thingies through first, taped the end of the wire bundle to it and just pulled them through. I reckon the larger diameter of the glass fibre rod as compared to string or wire helps open the grommet so the first plug goes through easier. Waving 3 ft of rod around under the car got interesting!

Best to get the back end nicely up in the air for this job. Theoretically it could be done by just pumping the suspension up into high mode but I reckon you'd need more than the standard complement of joints in your arms to manipulate things.

My control box lives in the rear light access area. Added a teeny toggle switch on a small bracket so I can turn the beast off if it has a meltdown.

Clive

If you run the wires to the left side of the car, there is an unused hole with a plain grommet in it that comes out below the rear lights. It's there in case you fit a twin towing socket arrangement and also behind the LH rear light there's a 4 way connector doing nothing that has ground, ignition switched power, permanent power and reversing light feed in it. Ideal place to run the cables to and connect it up. I fitted a reversing camera to mine just above the towbar (so I can hitch a trailer up on my own), cut a slit in the blanking grommet to run the wire through and connected using that connector.