Do you need cracked bumper repair?
A cracked bumper may not seem like a big deal. They can happen in small collisions, or even when you bump into something particularly sturdy. Small cracks might not even be very visible. When you examine the damage, you might decide you don’t need to fix the cracked bumper right away, or at all.
In the following post, our auto body repair experts at Car Tips will talk all things cracked bumper repair. We’ll talk about why driving with a cracked bumper is dangerous, as well as a few different methods of repairing them.
Why Do I Need Cracked Bumper Repairs?
Your cracked bumper will not affect how you drive your car. It won’t affect your steering, your brakes, your mirrors, and it is not illegal to drive with a cracked bumper. For this reason, it can be easy to ignore the need for a cracked bumper repair. When you’re driving your car, you might even forget there is a crack in your bumper.
Nevertheless, a cracked bumper can threaten your safety, as well as the safety of everyone in your car.
The bumper of a vehicle is a significant part of its protection. It’s called a bumper for a reason. It is there to absorb the shock of minor, everyday bumps, as well as to help protect your vehicle in the event of a collision. Your rear bumper is especially important, as it keeps foreign objects from impacting the gas tank at the rear of your vehicle.
Even a tiny crack in the bumper compromises its ability to do this.
Small cracks will become exponentially wider if you drive around with them. Small potholes and driveways may be no problem for your uncracked bumper, but when the bumper cracks, every bit of shock will only damage the bumper further. You may not even notice this damage worsening.
As you drive, the cracks in your bumper will widen and lengthen. If you get into a collision, or if you run into any sturdy objects, your bumper will not be able to protect you and your car. This will inevitably lead to expensive repairs that you could have avoided if you had gotten a cracked bumper repair at the beginning.
How Does a Cracked Bumper Repair Work?
Again, your bumper is a very significant part of your vehicle’s protection. If you repair it incorrectly, you might as well not repair it at all. You may even cause more damage to your bumper without meaning to during repairs.
For this reason, unless you have plenty of experience in cracked bumper repair, we would always advise that you visit a reputable auto body shop.
There are a couple of different ways to repair a cracked bumper. They are similar in a lot of ways but differ mostly in the material that binds the bumper back together.
Cracked Bumper Repair with Epoxy
With any bumper repair, the first thing we do at Car Tips is to remove the bumper. This is because a lot of the cracked bumper repair will occur from the back of the bumper, which is easier to reach if the bumper is off the car. Removing a bumper is not particularly serious. We want to make sure we’re reinforcing the crack, and this is the easiest way to do so!
Next, we would completely sand the area, to help the adhesive stick. Cleaning the affected area is an important step for making sure our repair lasts. We’ll also sand away paint surrounding the area, which allows better adhesion.
We would then use clamps or strong tape to hold the crack flush. Often times, we’ll fuse the crack by administering heat. This also helps to properly align larger cracks. Once we align the crack correctly, we would apply epoxy to the back of the crack. This would then dry overnight. Depending on the severity of the crack, our technicians may use several thin layers of filler to avoid rough surface areas.
Once the epoxy has dried overnight, we would remove clamps and tape. We would sand the outside of the damaged area so the filler can hold, and then apply body filler.
At this point, we could perform any touch-up work that’s necessary to get your car looking as good as new.
This is the most common method of cracked bumper repair. We can use this method to fix some pretty sizable cracks; however, if your bumper has sustained very severe damage, it may be best to simply replace it.
Do I Need to Replace My Bumper?
The short answer is probably not. There are a ton of ways a bumper can get dented or damaged. Hitting a pole or being rear-ended are two of the most common ways. As noted earlier, any damage to your bumper needs to be fixed. In some cases, you can pop a dent out, but in others, where the crack is large enough, it may be safer to replace the entire bumper. Though this isn’t standard, it does happen, from time to time.
Another reason you would need to replace your bumper is the hooks on the bumper are damaged or broken. Most bumpers have hooks that help them adhere to the valance panel. If the hooks are damaged, the bumper may fall or come off completely.
The methods above can repair most any crack in the bumper, whether it be minor or major. It is possible for a serious collision to damage your bumper so severely that you need a replacement bumper.
The only way to know if you need a replacement or a cracked bumper repair is to speak to an auto body shop. Remember, most bumper damage starts small. Initially, we can probably repair a crack in your bumper. But if you drive with a cracked bumper for six months, it becomes far less likely that we can repair it.