This week my wife came home dragging the rear bumper of her 1989 240 DL. After a careful examination, I determined that the only thing holding the bumper on were the body molding clips. I was grateful that the thing did not fall off on the highway.

So anyway, I just finished up fixing the bumper and I thought I would say a few words about how I did it. The process was really quite simple. First I removed the bumper. I basically just lifted it off the car. Then I removed the plastic covering from the bumper. It is clipped with those specialty clips that like to rust out.

Once I had the bare aluminum bumper in hand, I could see that it had rotted away where it was attached to the steel mounting brackets.

Then I used my Sawzall to cut off the 6 bolts that were still mounted to the brackets.

Next I went to my local home store and purchased a piece 1 inch steel channel 4 feet long. I cut the piece of stack into 4 1-foot sections. Then I carefully drilled 2 mounting holes in each 4 ½” apart.

Then I placed the bumper back on the mounts. With the bumper dangling there, I placed the metal stock in the bumper channels and lined up the holes. With some 1” long bolts, I then bolted the bumper back on using 3 bolts per bracket as Volvo did. The metal pieced I fabricated acted like big washers, covering the rotted bumper sections and pulling the good aluminum tight to the mounting brackets.

Now for good measure, I drilled the forth hole in each bracket and installed the remaining 2 bolts. My hand drill would not hold the bit I needed so I had to go with a small hole and file it to size.

With the bumper on, I carefully reattached the plastic components and the car is good to go. Note that I trimmed a couple of the tabs on the bumper cover off because the 1 foot washers covered the receiving openings in the bumper.

All in all, the job was not too bad and cost less than $10.00 in materials. The bumper is very strong now.

Just for fun I took a look at my 1990 240’s bumper. Sure enough, the aluminum of its bumper is rotting too. Those Sweeds are pretty sharp on some things but on others, well, they weren’t the sharpest pencil in the box. Seems that mating aluminum to steel is not a good idea. They really should have known better.