Proper Way To Repair/reconditon A Bumper After Accident?

[homemechanic]

Are there any body shop techs or experts out there?

Recently I got rear-ended. I just wanted to know what's the proper way to fix a bumper before I go to a shop.

1. What's a re-conditioned bumper?

2. If a bumper is repairable, should the existing paint be sand and scrap off completely prior to painting?

3. What's the typical practice of painting over old paint? Is there guidelines on how many layers of paint total is still consider acceptable?

4. I-car standards?

Thanks a lot!!!

[blk_on_blk]

Oh, man... that's a loaded question. I mean, getting rear-ended is a nasty thing, and it all depends on "how" you got rear ended. Was it a line-to-line tap in the bumper? Were you hit in the tail lights? Were you hit hard in the bumper?

I'm not exactly sure about the ES, but most newer cars have crumple zones in the bumper made of grid like foam. If hit lightly, you can crush your bumper structure and just need a new one. If hit harder, the force can crumple the floor pan in the trunk... it can ripple the roofline... it can cause the rear quarter panels to shift (but that's not too likely on the mid '90's ES, since the trunk lid line is so high and it's all tied together), and worst of all, you can tweak your frame/unibody where the car tracks dog-legged (the back end swings out a bit to one side as you go down the road). You just won't know until they start digging into the !Removed!-end and see what has been damaged and how deep it is.

I don't know what a 'reconditioned bumper' is... maybe it has the same skin, but new guts under it.

A bumper shouldn't need to be stripped to the base polymer to repaint, but it does need to be free of any wax, grease, grime, debris, or particulates... which means being sanded and primed. The paint on newer bumpers also has flexible additives mixed in, and I'm not sure what special conditions (if any) that requires.

The typical practice of painting over old paint is to rough sand the body of a car. Spots that need body work should be sanded to the metal, then filled/repaired. Then, once all the body work is done, the car gets a full coat of primer. It is then reviewed for any imperfections in the body work, it gets reworked if needed, then reshot in primer. Once the body is clean and straight, it gets shot in paint.

I'm not too sure about your question on limit of 'layers of paint'. I mean, many paint jobs have multiple layers of base color and even more clear coats to get depth to the finished results. That's multilayers just for one paint job. I don't think it's like a house roof where you can only reroof with so many layers of composite shingles. I imagine it would be more of a concern on paint thickness buildup.

Don't know about I-car standards.

Hopefully someone with more direct hands-on work with these cars can tell you about specific repairs. I'm just going off the few cars I've repaired, done body work on, and repainted... and none of them were ES's.