Tech: Putting DeSoto Bumpers on my 52 Chevy..

Ok, Here goes, this is my first tech post, so take it easy on me:

Ive never liked the look of stock style bumpers on 49-54 chevs, So I decided to make these fit:



Heres a before Pic:



The Desoto Bumper was too wide, and I also wanted to make it fit tighter anyway.

1. Remove bumper, and brakets.
2. Make sure car is on a flat and level surface--Then make sure front of car is level.
3. Use blocks to hold new bumper in its new position, then see how much your going to have to remove. It looked like I was going to need to lose about 2 inches on each side.
4. But heres where it gets tricky, I was going to cut the bumper under each bumper guard and remove 2 inches from each side, so that the guards would hide the weld (until I can afford Chrome). After looking at it for a while I found that this would lead to alot of extra work, and more if a chance that I would screw it up!

5. I decided to cut the bumper in the middle, then overlap each side unitl I got the proper spacing from the fenders:



6. Now this is wher you have to get artistic, if the bumpers were flat then you could just scribe a line and cut, but these have a "wavy" profile that is hard to make a straight vertical line on. so I put a square on the top of one side of the bumper using a vertical grille support as a reference.

Make a line on the "high" spots and use your eye to connect the dots..

First I cut the left side and then used the left side for a reference to cut the right.

Heres how much I ended up taking out:


7. Once I had both sides cut, I just mocked the bumper up one last time, tacked in several places, checked the alignement again, and welded her up!

8. Next I had to make brackets. By using the brakets for this bumper I found where the "old" brackets intersected with the "new" ones.. cut and welded.




The back was actually easier, because the bumper was the right width, I just had to use a grinder and make the inside lip have a different shape to it to match the car

Heres a before Shot:



Back Brackets: (just welded to some heavy duty plate, and bolted to the back crossmember):


And the Back Bumper:



And some After Photos after cleaning up the bumpers:

 

huge impovement, , , ,wouldn't have thought of using that bumper, but it works SO well. . . looks like a completely different car now,,,glad you tossed those painted ones

 

That looks great!!! did you snag the grill out of that Desoto???

 

I like it, that grill would look nice chromed as well but thats just me.

 

wow-that looks great! thanks for the write up too!

 

I still have the DeSoto grille, Thinking of using the teeth in this car...
The grilles surround does need chrome, just cant afford it right now...

 

Wow, huge improvement. Good work FIFTY2.

 

Nice stuff.......looks great on the car. never would have thought of using those bumpers on a chevy........great write up and picks as well

 

Very cool, thanks for sharing.

Rich

 

Have you thought of using another front bumper guard to "camoflauge" the welded seam in the center? Just a thought......

Great job!

 

looks good the teeth would look god in there too!! just my2

 

This helps a little:

 

looks good man

 

x2!

 

great improvement....why would you think there needs to be a chrome surround for the grille...the DeSoto doesn't have one...french a surround like over the grille now and be done....you're coming along real nice!

 

a good look grives the car a heavyer look i like it

 

Very nice!

 

I was looking at the bumpers on my 53 Desoto before I had them chromed and realized they would look good on my 1953 chevrolet. Good job, it looks great. The grill with the Desoto teeth would look very nice.

 

It's amazing how much of a difference that made.

 

Nicely done...

- Joe

 

I have the same bumpers which I plan to modify to use on my '53 Ford car. I don't understand what you did in numbers 5 and 6. What is overlapped, and why (if you wanted to take out a total of 4 inches, for instance) could you not just stick two pieces of 2" masking tape to the bumper vertically to make the cut lines?

This is important stuff for me because I need to do basically just what you did for my car.

The bumpers cleaned up really nice, what did you use to polish them?

 

how much is your chevy sectioned?

 

I don't believe it is sectioned.

 

That looks awesome. I'm with Squablow though...I would have used masking tape. Then you could have made the cuts where the bumper guards are to hide the welds.

 

looks great. i have a pair for me 53 ford. if i have to cut it will be behind the bumper guards to hide the welds.

 

Great job....

 

The problem with that is that the "profile (cross section)" of the bumper is a compound curve. I tried to use masking tape, but it would wrinkle, and was impossible to make a straight line.

I could have done the same thing behind the bumper guards, but I would have lost my bumper braket holes and bumper guard holes, and had more of a chance to get the bumper twisted, etc...

Doing it in the middle also allowed me to change the curve of the bumper slightly to better fit the front of the car..

Does that make sense?


to clean them up I used rubbing compound and then metal polish.



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like the bumpers
if you gots to paint the grill suround do it in body color or re chrome it its killing yer car
did you do the notch yet ?
it would have been grat for tec week
see ya at the round up

 

Yep, body color or chrome and you'll be tits.

 

Good job, I like what you've done.

My '50 Chevy project came to me minus the front bumper. Maybe now I'll be lookin' for a set of DeSotos.