Making the bumpers removable

I finally had to tackle the job of cutting the bumper off the front of the car and reattaching it. I had temporarily molded it to the car so that I could smooth out the fenders as one piece...I just didn't want to screw up all my finish work by cutting everything up. It actually went better than what I was expecting, the cut lines came out straight (I used a cut off wheel on my angle grinder) and the bumper came off as one nice piece. Below you can see I'm using a laser level to mark my cut line---



And here's the bumper completely off. I'm going to fab up an attachment system so that the bumper flare and the fender flare will join together to add some rigidity.


The next issue I ran into was the rear bumper. There isn't any reason to make the rear bumper removable since it's only cosmetic and covers up sheet metal behind it. However, I noticed that the rear bumper was distorted and misaligned. I either didn't notice before I made the fenders, or making the fenders misaligned the bumper. Either way, I had to fix the angle and gap of the bumper. The only solution was to relief cut the rear fender and slide the bumper cover forward about 1/4" and up an 1/8". I used a floor jack to hold it in place while I fiberglassed on a patch. As soon as the patch dries, I'll laminate some Kevlar onto the backside of the cut. Hopefully the repaired section will end up being stronger than before the cut.