I discovered this week that my rear bumper cover was starting to come off. A year ago I was slightly tapped in the rear at a stoplight by an inattentive SUV driver and had the trunk lid replaced by a body shop. The rear bumper cover was removed to inspect for damage but was reused.
When I went to remove the bumper cover I discovered that there are no fasteners holding the bumper cover to the bumper. All that had been holding the whole thing on was a couple of push pins attached to each fender liner and some old tape. I suspect the body shop got lazy and didn't replace any fasteners that had broken in the impact or otherwise degraded in the desert environment. (I had a very poor experience with them overall, so I'm not surprised). The problem is, without the old fasteners I'm having trouble identifying what I need to order. The realoem diagram (https://www.realoem.com/bmw/enUS/sho...diagId=51_4783) is not very helpful, and all of the guides I found online were for non-M's or removed the entire bumper all at once, which doesn't help me.
From just looking at the bumper cover, it appears there were 6 plastic rivets or something that connected from mounting brackets inside the bumper cover into the top of the foam piece (6) from the realoem diagram. There are also 4 mounting tabs that appear to connect the bumper cover to the actual bumper itself, but they have no space behind the holes to accommodate anything but a very shallow screw, which none of the parts in the realoem diagram appear to be.
Can someone who's taken a bumper cover off recently explain what's going on?
When I went to remove the bumper cover I discovered that there are no fasteners holding the bumper cover to the bumper. All that had been holding the whole thing on was a couple of push pins attached to each fender liner and some old tape. I suspect the body shop got lazy and didn't replace any fasteners that had broken in the impact or otherwise degraded in the desert environment. (I had a very poor experience with them overall, so I'm not surprised). The problem is, without the old fasteners I'm having trouble identifying what I need to order. The realoem diagram (https://www.realoem.com/bmw/enUS/sho...diagId=51_4783) is not very helpful, and all of the guides I found online were for non-M's or removed the entire bumper all at once, which doesn't help me.
From just looking at the bumper cover, it appears there were 6 plastic rivets or something that connected from mounting brackets inside the bumper cover into the top of the foam piece (6) from the realoem diagram. There are also 4 mounting tabs that appear to connect the bumper cover to the actual bumper itself, but they have no space behind the holes to accommodate anything but a very shallow screw, which none of the parts in the realoem diagram appear to be.
Can someone who's taken a bumper cover off recently explain what's going on?
Comment