I recently started school again. Up until this point my primary vehicle had been my trusted land cruiser. However, due to an ongoing LS swap on my truck, I was forced to find a plan B car to take with me to school. Luckily, I found a minty fresh Mercury Grand Marquis. However, this new car lacked anywhere to mount a set of steer horns. While I could have simply purchased a surplus police push bar, the little welding devil in my ear convinced me to create something more grand and completely from scratch.
First step, figure out how the bumper is going to attach. For me this was pretty easy as the frame rails have 4 holes each and a flat mating surface. I then started to frame out the structure of the bumper.
As you can see this was mostly made from a 2" pipe and some large 2x4 scrap pieces I had left over from making rock rails on my truck. An annoying part of this whole build were those extrusions you see next to the front wheels. They were welded in place and so I had to work around them when designing the bumper.
Next came the up rights that would serve to mount the steer horns and protect the grill. These were made from 2x2 rectangular metal.
Also at this time, I decided to work on my suspension to better support the mass of the new bumper. Some $10 rubber coil spacers from auto zone did the trick. These were actually more tricky to install than I expected, I had to disconnect the shock from the lower A-arm and the top to get the spring to decompress enough.
Then the fun part, bust out the plasma cutter and start ripping sheets of plate steel. I used 3/16" plate which is probably a little overkill, but it is what I had lying around from a previous bumper build.
Once everything was test fit, it was time to weld up all the seems. As you can imagine, this took FOREVER.
Since, I still hadn’t made my car heavy enough, I decided to tackle the rear. The vast expanses of plastic out back led to use the easier solution and leave the stock bumper in place and just create a cage in front of it.
Fabrication started by bolting some 1" by 5“ solid stock steel to the trailer hitch. From there I just used 2x2 rectangle to mimic the lines of the stock bumper.
The only tricky part to this was notching everything and getting the angles to line up. As you can see I notched the pipe to it wrapped along the lines of the car.
Last up was paint. This also took forever because of all the nooks and crannies in the bumper. I decided to use this bed-liner product that removes all the rubber particles for a smooth finish. It’s held up decently but still scratches when heavily abused.
Of course, how could I build these sweet bumpers and not add a bottle opener?
Overall, I’m really happy with how these turned out. I get a lots of stares and comments. When ever someone asks “why?” I simply respond: Life’s too short to drive boring cars...
