After reading various threads here I decided last week to remove the bumperettes. It seemed like it would be easy, just unbolt them and then polish up the underlying paint and plug the bolt holes. Easy enough right?
Turns out there was some variety of galvanic corrosion going on between the bolts and bumper that made things a little more complicated… this wouldn’t be a simple polish and plug. At this point I decided to just hit it with the pressure washer and see how bad it was.
My first thought was so simply remove the bumper and get it welded up and repainted at the local body shop. Stop by and explain things and they say they won’t work on Porsche… I do get that they aren’t certified to work on new stuff but I’m asking about having a removed bumper from a 40 year old car to be cleaned up.
This is where the good idea fairy comes in… since I’m going to have the bumper professionally refinished once I find a shop to do it I might as well take a hack at it myself. First hit with the sander:
After a lot more sanding I got it to the point where I thought it was good enough to paint. I’m not filling the couple areas with corrosion because the is really just an interim measure until I get around to finding a local body shop that can do things right. But it looks less crappy for now. Not the best pic but I found some very close to matching spray paint that makes it prettier.
The ends of the bumper strips stick out a bit and I haven’t quite figured out how to fix that yet. Ultimately they are gonna come off when I get the bumper refinished but they don’t bother me enough to pull off until then. I painted and installed some plugs just to tidy it up further than in this pic:
