06GRPLGT
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Posts posted by 06GRPLGT
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Liberal Albero JDM bumper and everything you need to make it work for $1300?
http://legacygt.com/forums/showthread.php/ca-liberal-albero-jdm-bumper-p5483425.html#post5483425
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I'm bottomed out at $1500 on this bumper. Git sum.
http://legacygt.com/forums/showthread.php/ca-liberal-albero-jdm-bumper-251321.html
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Liberal Albero bumper up for sale. Get it while it's hot.
http://legacygt.com/forums/showthread.php/ca-liberal-albero-jdm-bumper-linked-pics-251321.html
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Busted isn't the right word. Scratched up is more like it. If you're seriously interested I can take some pics. It's in excellent condition overall.
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Right now I'm looking at a k2 lip or a jpcarbon, not really liking the sti styled one but I gotta let the front end grow on me before I make a decision. I waxed it up really good yesterday although the paint is fresh and I love the new good lines when looking g over the front. Miss the scoop already but FMIC will look great tucked in behind now.
As for a clear bra I'm not positive if I'll be doing it but that seems to be the best thing to do, I'll wait till spring since she'll be in the garage all winter under a car cover
Car is coming along beautifully, man. Did the paint cure enough before wax?
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...Disclosure: It recently met with a curb, so the underside of the bumper isn't as pretty as it once was. I'll get around to posting pics at some point.
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I really like the look of this bumper. Are these no longer available?
This is the Liberal Albero JDM bumper. Took me months to get (shipped from Japan), and longer to finish.
See my posts starting at #1016 in this thread. The whole car is for sale, but is about to go under the knife for a full part out. LMK if you're interested in the car or bumper
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Fresh to def. Really cool to watch the progression of these.
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http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/215/870/1323642227001.png
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Excellent documentation of the process. Would love to get some of those filler plates!
Just lemme know!
Alright JDM crew... Hopefully you can see the forum link below without being a member. This is my build thread on a local motorsport forum. Starting at post #183 is my trials and tribulations for completing the Albero bumper. In there are pictures of filler plates my friend made to fill the gap from the JDM bumper to the USDM fender liners under the car. He says if you ship him a template of your setup and send pics of yours, he can make you some from aluminum for $25 shipped. If yours are exactly like mine, it'd be a little cheaper. Also, if some of you go in together, it'd be cheaper on a group buy kinda thing. If you're someone involved with sourcing and providing JDM bumpers, this could be a good collaboration.Once he did the hard work making them, the install is SUPER easy. Just popits and done. Hope this can help some LGT friends in need. Would be cool for at least one or two of you to be guinea pigs to try this out to see how him making one for you remotely would go. He's one of those super cool people that is the kinda guy we all wish all sellers/buyers would be like, so I can pretty much promise he'd go out of his way to make it a good experience for you. The price he's offering is pretty low margin for him, so hopefully you might see this as a good opportunity. He's just a fellow Subaguru that likes to help the community.
Here's the link: http://www.idahomotorsports.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54700
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More notes if you're still listening...
It snows here and I don't want to risk hurting the bumper during storms in the winter months, so it comes off and goes back on seasonally. This is where I resent those of you in nicer climates where it doesn't snow. Anyhoo, it drives my wife crazy that I store it in our theater room during the winter 'cause I gotta protect my boo. lol
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Not sure if I mentioned that all popits and bolts touching fiberglass now have rubber washers to protect the glass. Varying sizes for each location.
Oh, and the saga continues. Below are the best pics I could get attempting to show the clear bra I had installed. If you look very closely you can see the seam of where the clear bra ends and the bare paint is. All exposed vertical and horizontal surfaces are covered. After spending all this time and money getting the bumper to where it needed to be, I didn't want it to just end up with a big rock chip in it, so it now having become an investment, so to speak, I needed to protect my investment. lol
Further, I wasn't surprised to learn that an uber-rare JDM bumper wasn't on the list of thousands of pre-programmed cuts in the computer at the clear bra place, so lucky for me they had to do it completely custom to the tune of $450!
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x312/kagenmateer/Suby/2_zps427ea5ac.jpg
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x312/kagenmateer/Suby/1_zpsc2facaaf.jpg
Side note: Albero sent two of the upper (smaller) size mesh pieces and trying to go back through Japan channels to get the right one proved more difficult than sourcing another one stateside. After tons of searching, I ended up getting a tighter mesh for the bottom opening (if you look closely at above pics u can see they're slightly different) so you couldn't see into the bottom opening very well since I don't like FMIC lag and prefer to stay top mount and inside there is ugly.
Might as well total this up for you fellas...
Bare bumper: Got a deal at $1850 shipped and took six months to arrive
Paint (2 rounds): $250
Aluminum filler plates and labor to help with install: About $100
Miscellaneous oddball hardware: About $50
Custom Clear Bra: $450
Total (not including countless hours of my own time): $2700
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Here's the pic of the undertray with the cutouts we made circled.
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x312/kagenmateer/Underliner_zpsc775931e.jpg
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...aaaaaaand here's some pics of the finished product just in time for FormFest.
And here's some other pics from the Larry Miller Meet/Show
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(Cont.)
Sidenote: Kept the fenders taped up to avoid the bumper scratching them with all the R&R I was doing. This is a better picture of how my wheels and center caps turned out.
After looking at pictures of the car, it seemed like something was missing and that it wasn't as nice as I'd expected. I quickly realized the paint mistake I'd made. I couldn't figure out what was missing until it hit me. Here are the pictures I was looking at.
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x312/kagenmateer/Suby/10-12-13_zpsa4ac0291.jpg
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x312/kagenmateer/Suby/10511063243_c641c6b0ea_b_zpsd5fa00dc.jpg
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x312/kagenmateer/Suby/Albero%20Bumper/COPY2_zpsef88043a.jpg
You've probably figured out by now that I'd forgotten to ask Gordon to paint the areas to each side of the license plate black. So the bumper went back for another round of paint. Luckily Gordon gave me a break on the price for round two. Waiting twice for the paint to completely cure didn't help how long it was already taking to complete this project.
Anyhoo, next step after getting the paint corrected was to figure out how to cleanly mount a plate to the front. I wanted it as low-profile/flush as possible without touching/rubbing the paint. With Nate's help again, he tapped the bumper with threads so I could source the right pitch/length of allthread that would allow me to do the following. Note: This meant another round of running around and digging through my own hardware stash to come up with something that would work perfect.
The new hardware hit the bumper a little, so I trimmed it to fit.
Now if you look close, you'll see the plate frame doesn't touch the bumper, but it's super flush and solid. This meant another couple acorn nuts getting sprayed with my trusty truck bed liner.
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(Cont.)
Next up was figuring out the clusterphuck that was mounting USDM fogs onto JDM mounting points. This took two days of studying and trial/error to sort out.
Here's the wonderful instructions. They were pretty much worthless.
The rest of these pictures are pretty self-explanatory.
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(Cont.)
Next step was round one of paint. I forgot one very important part in the paint scheme. Can you spot what's wrong with this picture? For reference, I've provided a couple pictures of what it's supposed to look like. I'll get to the answer later in case you don't spot it.
At this point, it was time to see Nate (XissiX) again for filler plates. It was important to me to keep the underneath sealed for aerodynamics, cosmetic, weatherproofing, skidding, snow driving, and keeping the engine bay clean. Nate's a badass and has lots of cool toys like a plasma table. I don't understand this part, but he drew this cool looking diagram that went into the computer so the table knew what to cut. This part was impressive.
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(Cont.)
After that, I needed to figure out mounting points. The top of the bumper secured well at each end with stock popit locations that lined up nicely, the center of the top would be solid since it lined up well with the stock bolt locations, but nothing on the bottom lined up except a few popits on each end. Filler plates would utilize some stock and some created popit locations to secure the sides/ends of the bottom of the bumper really well, so I devised a way to make a solid center mounting point for the bottom of the bumper using the stock undertray. First was drilling a hole in the undertray from above using a spade bit on the end of a few extensions:
At Nate's recommendation, I began my search for rubberized mounting hardware. Fiberglass doesn't like vibrating against metal, so moving forward, everything the bumper touched needed to be rubber. After spending more time than I care to mention at places like D&B and Fastenall, this was the first setup I came up with. The center of this three way is some rubber thingy I found (threaded spacer of some kind with threads impregnated into it).
This is looking down from above, so the hex bolt is underneath where you can't see it. That bolt threads all the way through the threaded rubber spacer and into the acorn nut on top.
They didn't quite come together as tight as I wanted, so I super-glued some metal washers onto the rubber thingy to add some length to it. Read: Finding all the bits n pieces in the right lengths with matching threads was quite a project. You can also see in this picture that I ended up notching one side of the spacer so it would fit perfect without hitting the stock metal mounting bracket. Could've easily worked without, but I'm anal about these things.
Next up was adding rubber washers to the setup, and painting the acorn nut black with my beloved spray on truck bed liner. That stuff is seriously awesome for stuff like this.
Once the bumper was on with the mesh installed, you can't get to the top of the bolt without this setup. I would come down from above with it while holding a wrench on the hex bolt underneath.
This is what that all looked like at the end. Tried to make it as discrete as possible.
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I've finally got some time to put down the latest updates.
First, here's a rundown on the JDM Liberal Albero bumper. The above pictures are after the first test fit.
Step one was modifying the stock USDM bumper beam to allow for the shallower JDM bumper. Most guys in the U.S. just remove the beam to make life easy, but I didn't want to compromise the structural integrity of the car. Sometimes I care too much.
Here's the stock beam "before" picture:
XissiX helped me cut both the beam and it's mounting brackets like so:
Had to unbolt and rebolt the whole thing a few times to get it perfect.
The hood latch must be just a little different in Japan, so we had to do a quick modification. Here's before and after:
Looking underneath the car, it became very clear that JDM didn't fit ANYTHING like my stocker. None of the mounting points lined up, and there were huge gaps in the fender liner and undertray. We decided we'd regroup when XissiX could mock up some filler plates. First, we had to cut some holes in the undertray (three to be exact...along the top one in the middle and on each side. These are for the Albero bumper mounting tabs to go through:
The mock fit went well, so I headed back home.
After adding the mesh it rubbed in four spots (see tape), so I spent several more hours back at home taping spots that rubbed, grinding, tweaking, and refitting. This step was super annoying and tedious.
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I can only post 20 pics at a time, so this is gonna be chopped up, but I'm just copying over all my posts. Hope you fellas don't mind. Most comprehensive USDM to JDM bumper conversion to date, I do believe.
How it showed up from Japan:
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x312/kagenmateer/2013-08-19103746_zps8ca493ea.jpg
Couple crappy pics of where it's at. Bumper beam, etc. has been hackzord to fit JDM bumper. Now in the process of making all connecting points rubberized.
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x312/kagenmateer/Suby/2013-08-25204027_zpsd517d3f3.jpg
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x312/kagenmateer/Suby/2013-08-25145359_zps4c252d05.jpg
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Crap. Hang on...
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...also in my build thread toward the end are some pretty sweet super strong sway bar support brackets he fabbed for me. Some of you may be aware of the stock bracket shearing off.
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Alright JDM crew... Hopefully you can see the forum link below without being a member. This is my build thread on a local motorsport forum. Starting at post #183 is my trials and tribulations for completing the Albero bumper. In there are pictures of filler plates my friend made to fill the gap from the JDM bumper to the USDM fender liners under the car. He says if you ship him a template of your setup and send pics of yours, he can make you some from aluminum for $25 shipped. If yours are exactly like mine, it'd be a little cheaper. Also, if some of you go in together, it'd be cheaper on a group buy kinda thing. If you're someone involved with sourcing and providing JDM bumpers, this could be a good collaboration.
Once he did the hard work making them, the install is SUPER easy. Just popits and done. Hope this can help some LGT friends in need. Would be cool for at least one or two of you to be guinea pigs to try this out to see how him making one for you remotely would go. He's one of those super cool people that is the kinda guy we all wish all sellers/buyers would be like, so I can pretty much promise he'd go out of his way to make it a good experience for you. The price he's offering is pretty low margin for him, so hopefully you might see this as a good opportunity. He's just a fellow Subaguru that likes to help the community.
Here's the link: http://www.idahomotorsports.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54700
Official jdm conversion/aftermarket body thread
in Exterior/Aesthetic
Posted
I'm at $1100 on this. Someone snatch it up.