Some helpful person badly cracked the abs on my rear bumper...As far as I can see this part code is OOS everywhere... Unless someone knows of a specialist who may have one. This one has less cut-outs than the alternative, which seems to be freely available....or does anyone know who actually makes/ made them? I only really need the abs, so cd try a breaker, but the outers are messy to remove without further damage
You've obviously done your research but as far as I can see the only difference is whether they are in primer or plain. What do you mean by the others having more cut-outs?
By cut outs I mean the holes for the lashing eye and the exhausts, but the guess work is made a bit harder by the fact that very few sellers can be bothered to supply a photo of the sku. So i had surmised that the difference between abs on the autobio one and the standard one was cutouts around the exhausts... but I may be making that up.
The stc4031 is for autobiography specifically, for VA on.... https://rimmerbros.com/Item--i-STC4031P
So then a different question... what is/ was the difference in bumper types, other than painted or not. Maybe i don't need to care and can just get the one that is available, spray it up and job done
Some are smooth while others are textured. The painted ones are usually smooth while the textured ones are left plain. The Ascot is an early car (TA VIN) while mine is a 98 (WA VIN) and there doesn't appear to be any difference, neither have cut-outs for the exhausts.
I believe it is possible to invisibly repair cracked ABS bumpers using the hot staple technique and a suitable filler. If the repaired bumper is to be painted I see no reason why a proper repair couldn't be made. You may need to talk to the folk who repair motorcycle fairings rather than car people tho'.
Certainly the staple repair a friend did on the cracked rear hugger on my Yamaha GTS1000 is unobtrusive even without final filling and refinishing.
Its impossible to remove the ABS from the metal support frame. If you do resort to another bumper or even if you just pull yours off for repair its advisable to seriously de-rest and proof the metalwork. Mine was OK but not pristine when I pulled it off to fit parking sensors shortly after buying the car. 11 years on when I pulled it off again to replace the parking kit due to a failed sensor I discovered the mounting lugs had disappeared and the rest of the support was in a bad way. It was basically just sitting there. No way could it be refitted as was and, being unwilling to trust pictures to be sure of getting a good one mail order, I resorted to creative welding and re-engineering of brackets to span the missing parts of the metalwork. Had to make a couple of special alignment tools to get the new brackets in the right place. Took 4 days of on and off work due to the essential breaks to bring my temper back into acceptable human range. Welding to (mostly) rust is not my favourite pastime. Considerable verbal encouragement was involved!
Having put it back on it looks pretty decent actually and lines up perfectly.
Seriously annoyed with myself for not taking the time to treat it properly when it first became apparent that my car suffers from rust overt the alst couple of ft of chassis et al. As it was once a seaside care I suspect it may have put boats in the water a few times.
Clive
Last time this happened (Hyundai committed suicide at c 15mph) the insurers wanted to just replace the bumper but claimed they couldn't get one so I was trying to get ahead of them this time. I know the metal work on the current bumper is good (in the sense of recoverable) as i have already removed the bumper, separated the steel from the ABS, rewelded and repainted.
Just less convinced it is repairable this time around, but who knows