Just got through doing the rear bumper swap for my car and wanted to post up about my experience and the steps I went through. Total time for the swap for me was about 2.5 hours. Knowing what I know now, it would probably be about 1.5 hours time.
Tools required:
1 - Short #2 Philips Head
1 - Long #2 Philips Head
1 - Panel Popper or Flat Blade Screwdriver.
1 - 10MM Deep Well Socket
1 - Handsaw
The rear pumper is held on by a total of 4 10MM nuts, 6 Philips head screws, 6 Push/screw clips, and 2 push body clips.
I would started off this project by disconnecting the trunk light so you don't run the battery down while you have the trunk open for an extended time.
Remove the carpeted trunk floor panel.
Now you'll want to remove the trim panel around the trunk latch, so you can pull the carpet back to get at the 10mm bolts. This trim piece is held on by 4 philips head screws and 6 plastic push clips.
Remove the covers for the screws with a small flathead screwdriver.
Then remove the screws located under the covers.
Take your panel popper and remove the remaining 6 clips, or you can use the panel itself to remove them as it has a good bit of surface area and will pull them out with ease. Then this piece can be removed. Take not of which clips came from which holes.
Now you can remove a couple more clips holding the side carpets on and get at the 10mm bolts holding the bumper on.
Next you'll need to remove the 6 screw/clippy things from the top of the bumper cover. (Note: The 04 bumper cover has 6 of these where the 05-06 only has 4 so if you ruin a couple like I did you'll still be okay)You might have to pull the trunk seal out of the way to get to a couple of them. These can be a pain in the ass to get out, you can try to unscrew them but most times they just spin around, I ended up using the panel popper to put leverage on them and back the screws out.
Now we can move to the last 6 screws on the outside of the bumper. At each wheel well there are 2 screws up at the top of the bumper, this is where the short Philips head driver comes into play, otherwise you have to remove the wheel to get a long driver in there.
and 1 screw up under the edge that attaches to the inner fender liner.
While your down on the creeper or floor, go ahead and remove the 2 push clips from the rear of the car connecting the undertray to the bumper cover.
Once those are removed the last thing to do is pull the sides of the bumper cover away from the quarter panel straight out to unclip it.
Now you should be ready to remove the cover by pulling straight back from the car.
Installation is pretty much the reverse of removal. There area couple things to watch out for on the installation. The impact absorber from the 04 will not work with the 05-06 bumper, I had to cut the bottom half off my unit to get it all to go back together and I also had to trim the rear undertray back edge to fit into the new rear bumper slots. Everything past the bend in the tray has to be removed along with certain areas of the flashing that hit the new cover.
Hope this helps out, as I couldn't really find a write up about this yet.
Before.
After.
Linear Mode
