Bumpers

You may remember that Sunny came from California without a front bumper. I had hoped that the wrapped package in the Ebay picture was a front bumper, but it turned out to be  a very dirty car cover, which I threw out right away.

In one of my first posts on the  Sunbeam club website mentioned that the bumper was missing. I gentlemen from Pennsylvania, who uses the name Volvoguy, told me that the front and rear Sunbeam bumpers are identical and that he happened to have a few. In fact, he dismantles Sunbeams as a secondary source of income. That name and the possibility of a trove of Sunbeam parts intrigued me.

A few weeks ago I drove up to Harrisburg to pick up a bumper, brackets, and a few other used parts that will be covered in future posts.  The bumper was mostly straight and rust free, but was very dirty. After a lot of scrubbing and polishing, I determined that the chrome was gone, and at some point both bumpers would need to be rechromed.

Before installing the bumper, I needed to repair the left side body mount, where the bracket bolts to the chassis. It seems that the captive nut was pulled off of the car somehow. My friend Paul offered to weld in a new nut. Fortunately, Sunny was running well enough to drive to Paul’s garage. Sorry, no pictures of Paul with the welder. I was too busy playing with Bernie.

Here is the bumper on the car. If you think that the end of the bumper is point down you are right. In this picture, I have the bumper brackets switched left and right. Swapping one side for the other cured the problem.