Tips on installing body kit
 

Hello, I'm getting ready to install my GP sports bodykit and do a complete paint job on my 7 and I'm looking for any tips from people who have installed this specific kit. Ive worked in a bodyshop for about 6 years so i have a lot of experience with bodywork and painting but Ive never installed a fiberglass kit. I'm experienced enough to know to get this thing to fit perfect before i paint it. I know I'm going to use the front and rear bumper brackets from the original bumpers but i cant decide on what to use where the front and rear bumpers wrap around the fenders and quarter panels, id like to use rivets if i can because they look much cleaner then screws but i haven't fit them up yet to find out if rivets will work in the wheel well areas. i have no clue what to use at the area where the bumpers meet the body where the old side mouldings/side markers would be, any ideas? only thing i can think of is urethane glue or rivets/screws underneath the side markers.

I also have no ideas on how to mount the side skirts. i noticed that where the side skirts meet the body where the mouldings would go, they have a strange lip with about a 1 inch flat surface that looks like its meant to slide down on something or to kind of hang on some type of bracket but it didn't come with any hardware or instructions so i dunno.. any tips from someone with a little more experience with this specific kit would be great, thanks in advance

i am surprised that with 6 years with body and paint knowledge you have not put on a body kit before. Like most kits including yours its not going to fit perfect, there may be areas with some serious gaps or excessive tightness. But you wont know where they are until you do a test fit. During your test fit note those areas as you might need to do some grinding. Note the mounting points of your stock bumper as you may need to drill holes if your kit is not predrilled. You may use zip ties for test fitting, but do not use zipties for your final product. If you want show room type quality and fitment you better be well diverse in fiberglass knowledge and repair. Depending how OCD you are about it you can spend 1 afternoon, 1 day or 1 week test fitting. As far as hardware is concerned use as much of the stock items as you can. If you run out you can piece some up at your local hardware store. Good luck

heres a good tip. take ur time with it, no one has a gun to ur head to finish it. haste makes waste. nuff said

best advice. :icon_tup:

Also, please dont mold your kit in!!! It seems like an easy answer that people come to for a crap fitting kit lol.. You may need to trim some of teh fiberglass here and there. Just test fit etc.

You may need to use some muscle to fit the kit, like forcing it to wrap around the fenders etc.. I suggest rocking the kit for a while before you paint it, so it can work its way to fit the car if you can, or work out all the kinks in the kit so there will be no problems when you have it painted and put it on the car.

my Gp-sports kit was put on really nice, they fixed the skirts and rear bumper seemless to the car. front bumper is fixed with the stock bolts and some small screws inside the wheel arch

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well I'm going to be pretty OCD about this kit. I think its impossible not to be if you want to be a good body man. i know its strange i haven't ever installed a kit after all these years but our shop gets all our work from the manheim auto auction, they are all dealer cars so no kits on these cars. I just finished doing a complete interior restoration on the car, its going to be a show quality car so this kit needs to be perfect. if you want to have an idea how OCD I'm going to be with this thing, i can tell you that i have already covered the entire kit with a skim coat of fiberglass reinforced putty and i block sanded the whole thing since even the highest quality fiberglass has waves and imperfections. this kit will look as smooth as the rest of the car. i figured im going to have to do this since the car will be black and you would see every wave very easily.

Im going to be taking alot of time to make this fit perfectly, ive been in the business long enough to know to take my time. I just spent three weeks of working everyday to restore the interior.

im more concerned with how im going to mount the side skirts and how to mount the sides of the bumper since the stock bumpers didn't wrap around like this kit does.

oh and BTW i will never mould a kit. thats for cars that never get driven. they all crack out at sometime....

oh man thats literally the most perfect job ive ever seen.

if you mould the front bumper, it will crack! eventually you will hit a speedbump or whatever.

but for the sides and rear it is no problem. the bodyshop that did mine has years of experience in this and cars are running over 12 years without cracking.
it all depends on the skills of the guy in the shop and quality of the materials used....

"my Gp-sports kit was put on really nice, they fixed the skirts and rear bumper seemless to the car. front bumper is fixed with the stock bolts and some small screws inside the wheel arch"

how did they screw it in the wheel wells? theres not really anything to screw it too...the lip that tucks around in there is only like a quarter inch and the kit sits pretty far away from that lip..

they fixed a small bracket on the inside of the body panels were you can screw into...

ahh that makes sense.. so your saying the bracket is screwed thruogh the lower flat part of the fender (where the factory chip guard is) where the body kit covers it, like you would see the screws to the bracket if the kit wasnt on..if that makes any sense..lol

yes, kinda like that

Thats right, As for myself instead of screws i used Rivets, on the back side i made a single piece bracket about 4 inches in length. Made 4 and put them on the back of the lower wheel well arch. This allowed me to properly stabilize the kit without any bulky heavier screws, and let it sit flush. I want to redo it however and replace the rivets with flat hex bolts, so i can use allen wrenches to dismount kits when i need to.

what i like about body kits now days is that you may purchase them in flexible urethane, rather than a stiff crack prone FRP materials that i am used to in the late 90s early 2000. Not only are they great for fitment, but during an auto accident they absorb energy & dampen very well and still retain a very good shape. Iv seen a S13 at a drift competition in Hawaii that slammed right into the wall, Fenders, lights hood doors were mangled yet the front bumper and side skirts retained their original shape, and it was obvious that the bumper did receive impact because the of paint exchange.

Although i hate molded kits, even for sideskirts. I have to admit your body guys that did your work did a very good job. They kept the seams of the molding and it looks very straight cut. Furb your car always looked good regardless, i cant complain.

Really good site
http://fiberglassforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=12
you have to register to view it but its worth it. Fiberglass forums, people do all kinds of crazy stuff there.

so then what i should do is make a bracket and rivet it to the inner flap of the front bumper in the wheel area then have it so the bracket bolts to the lower flat area of the fender that the bumper covers up? the bolts or screws will be accessible from the inside with the plastic wheel liner removed? any of you guys have a pic of your brackets so i can get a better idea?

my advice is when your fitting your parts dont just hold them up in place, you MUST attach them. Where you might use rivets use a small zip screw, where your using double sided tape use a small dab of hot glue.

when you just hold it up with your hands you dont realize that a stiffer part like fiberglass wont give a bit like urethane will, so you hold it up with your hands checking fitment and it all looks good, but when you go to attach it for good suddenly that corner does not line up anymore because the opposite corner wont have that tiny bit of give. Remember it might be slightly flexible, but it aint gonna stretch.
I learned that the hard way after taking 10 hours to fit and trim a FC2000 front bumper for someone, I literally needed a 1/16th of a inch give- well it gave in the form of a small crack.

oh wow that sucks... i do plan on bolting up the factory brackets and all then using small screws or rivets in the sides to test fit it. im planning on taking many many hours to fit this up perfectly i guess i have enough experience to be able to make my own brackets and other forms of mounting this kit, i just figured some people who have installed this kit could save me some time by telling me what they used...so far you guys have already provide some very helpful info but keep it coming..

some flat aluminum stock comes in handy to make brackets for supports, easy to bend and drill. Cut some stock 1" wide, its easy to work with that size. Using the aluminum means you wont have to paint it and wont have to worry about rusting makeshift metal brackets.

wow thats an awesome idea! i was worried about the brackets rusting..and also your right it would be way easier to work with..now ill have to figure out where to find some..

I had some cut from a local shop, they used a press, I forget exactly how thick the material was but its under 1/4" thick, easy to bend in a vise, easy to drill.

you might want to buy a heat gun.. since you're ocd about fitment and such.. it'll allow for easier small adjustments

heat gun works on fiberglass? thats news to me....

zip ties are a great invention, wont leave home without them, Zip it an drift it!

ahhhhh zip ties
where would my fc be without them

Lots of good tips here.

All comes down to the prep. There's nothing *special* about fitting a kit on a car, whether its fiberglass, urethane or other material. You do have to know the material you're working with however, but beyond knowing how to treat each different substrate the way it needs to be treated, its all about how well - or how shitty - you want it to look.

This is where my experience differs a little. A front bumper - absolutely Furb is right, it will crack in no time flat. Sideskirts.....less likely given the lack of flex involved.....rear bumper more likely to crack then the sides, but less likely then the front bumper.

YES - using top drawer materials applied properly with good technique and skill will make a shave job that lasts LONGER....but never, in the 30+ years our shop has been doing body work have I ever stood behind a mould job. I tell the customer how it is, explain the risks, and if they want to do it I'll do the best I can, but I never say it will last forever. Anything else I do has a lifetime warranty though :)

The science:

Fiberglass and metal are two different materials. Plain and simple. They expand and cotract at different rates. There are flex agents you can add in the paint (prevent it from fully curing) which will allow some compliance, but for how long? They will always expand and contract differently. Even when your car is just sitting there, in the sun, not driving - the two panels are trying to seperate themselves.

Are there glues to glue them together? Yeah. Are there glues to glues metal to metal? Yeah. But lets think if you were going to patch a rust hole on your car, would you glue on more metal, or weld it? Weld probably, right? (unless you're panel bonding a new quarter on a vehicle) Why would you weld it over glue? because you're not introducing any foreign or different materials, as well as getting a better bond, right? Well there's a reason you will *never* be able to weld (fuse) metal to fiberglass..............................because they're completely different :lol:

And finally - ALL, and I mean all, top quality panel bonding agents are borne of EPOXY. Body filler (top quality) is not epoxy, its polyester. There are epoxy fillers, but they are flexible fillers for bumpers, not designed for metal. The #1 rule about epoxy and polyester is that they don't mix, and they do not get along. Most panel bonding agents will explicitly say in the instructions *TO NEVER* have exposed adhesive where filler is being applied for the reasons I mentioned. Doing so while shaving a panel is physically impossible.

So rules will be bent to make it happen, it can be done and last a long time, but never forget the science behind it because no matter what anyone says, or how long their sanding block is :lol: they can never escape pyshics!! :)

I have been working on my stock bumpers lately, and been using structural urethane, real good stuff. I like the flexible adhesives for bonding things like skirts because it has that little bit of flex and give.

I have epoxy fairing materials, they are not cheap and they take a long time to cure.

If you wont accept that one day your molded in parts may crack, then dont do it. If your a super picky person and wont accept that later down the road even if they dont crack you will see the seam- then dont do it.

yeah i will never mold a body kit to a car, to me the molding only looks slightly better then a factory fit body kit. To me its not worth the risks, if it were to crack out you have one hell of a mess on your hands. plus what happens when you need to remove the bumpers for whatever reason? or if someone hits you your screwed..not worth it..

anyone else have any tips or pictures of there brackets?

well i got the rear bumper fitted up today, i took my time and spent about 3 hours drilling holes for the factory brackets at the top and then sanding/grinding the sides where they meet up to the quarter panel.i was able to use all the factory brackets on top and this thing is SOLID, its probably the sturdiest fiberglass bumper install ive seen so im stoked.. then i used some temporary screws in the wheel well area to fasten the sides. it fits really really nice now. almost factory fit. im going to add a little duraglass to the one corner to build it out a bit but that wont be a big deal.

today i had off work so i worked 5 hours on the two side skirts. they were a bitch to say the least.. however i did this the hard way because i wanted to be able to remove these easily if i ever need too. From working in the bodyshop ive been keeping an eye out for some nice brackets that come on cars stock to hold mouldings/bumpers on. i was able to find these slick strips of metal that are made to hold those huge side mouldings on chevy astro vans. they screw to to the body then they have a nice 1 inch lip that comes out then up..picture one half of the field goal post for football. that is the shape of them. this allows a nice lip to slide the sideskirts down on then they hold it tight to the body. they worked very nice. then i put a couple temporary pop rivets in the wheel well areas and a few across the top edge in the door jam area. This body kit crap seems to take for EVER to get done the right way. but i know the longer i take to fit this stuff the better its going to look when its done so it will be well worth it. i will put some pics up later.. i cant wait to have this kit fitted so i can start doing real body work on the actual car. i hate fitting this kit. my back is killing me from doing it for so long.. tomorrow i will fit up the front bumper. the hardest part will be cutting the radiator center (mouth) area on the front bumper..i have to trim it to fit around the huge intercooler and piping. anyone have any tips on how to trim this without being able to fit the bumper where it needs to be?

Yup. grab a friend who is willing to take it on and off with you at least 12 times...... thats what i did.

Take your time using the cuttoff tool a little at a time, if you take too much off, its more of a pain to attatch cut fiberglass, than pulling the bumper cover several times.

You are almost done, so dont rush :).

post pics too.

john ny

yeah to bad i dont have anyone available during the times i work on it so im doing it all by myself..lol but i work in the bodyshop by myself so im use to installing bumpers alone.. tomorrow im doing the front. the biggest pain in the ass will be triming it to fit the intercooler pipes. i want to make a half circle cutout so it looks like the bumper is moulded to the the intercooler pipes..

Measure the shit out of it then. It will be so much easier with 2 people. You might have to pull out some guilt, to get friends to help . "Remember asshole when i lent you 200 dollars", or "what about that time i picked you up from bla" Your friends should want to help you.........that kinda sucks, man.

Pictures.....................

Good luck, based on what you have said, it seems lke everything is under control.

john ny

yeah i have freinds that will help me but they all work when im working on it and i dont feel like waiting for people..but today my freinds coming over to help with the front bumper so it should go smoothly..

ok...wow me and my buddy spent 6 HOURS!! today just fitting the front bumper!! omg it was horrible...i had to cut about 5 inches off the 3 front grill openings or (the mouth) because my huge greddy front mount would not fit with the way the bumper was..if you have ever seen this kit, the grill openings go in like 10 inches... i must have had the bumper on and off 40 times no exaggeration. but now it fits awesome! so the 6 hours of fit time on it was worth it. i used the stock bracket on the top then the rest is bolted on. here are the pics as promised..by the way. all the white x's are door dings i will be fixing haha. this thing is going to be as straight as the day it rolled off the assembly line..and yes i know the intercooler is crooked in the one pic, dont worry it will be straightend... p.s the pics do not do it justice. the fit of the kit is seriously just as good as a factory bumper..

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dam your kit fits great! and you didnt have to stupid mold it in *mold just makes the car look like performance/tuning is not of importance since it limits what you can do to the car*

some people trim out this part in honor of using the stock ones on the fenders
http://i39.tinypic.com/2vt76lk.jpg

yeah it fits awesome now, however the thing fit freaking terrible before i spent like 20 hours on it..some areas i even heat the fiberglass up with my big torpedo heater and reformed it until it fit perfect. I'm very anal about bumper gaps and fitment of everything..and yes i will NOT be molding this kit. and another nice thing is i can unbolt the whole kit whenever i want, no glue anywhere and no screws hidden by putty, i used all stock brackets and the astro van moulding metal strips for the side skirts then a few rivets in the wheel well areas and two under where the side markers cover on the front bumper..

^^^nice work, man.

john ny

well i didn't want to trim that part out because i think it looks better with it how it is, plus the side marker allows you to hide 2 rivets underneath it. this helps a lot with holding the sides on.

thanks for the complements john

Edit* what do you guys think about the side openings on the front bumper, where you can see the piping. do you think it looks ok or should i put some screen in there? i hate the look of the silver screen but i was thinking maybe black screen but i just dont know yet...its going to be a hard decision

^^^^^Screen is for chicken coops and screen doors only.

:)

john ny

haha yeah i hate the screen too but you can see the whole front end of the frame through that hole lol i guess once the car is on the ground it will be too low for anyone to see in there when they're close to the car. it just looks bad now because its on jack stands up in the air

All over the place.

so today i double checked the fitment of all the body kit pieces then i removed the bumpers and side skirts and i started the body work on the actual body of the car...i got the whole passenger side DA sanded down and got glaze on all the tiny door dings. the only thing wrong with the body is a bunch of tiny door dings and one small rust spot on the drivers side quarter panel, behind the wheel. its crazy that there is only one rust spot on a 20 year old car..i also found out after sanding it that its the original single stage black paint. this thing has never had any paint work!! that's suprising for a car this old..the paint was still in good condition too but there was a lot of small door dings..I've been getting this car done fast, i started on it Superbowl weekend and i have already done a whole interior restoration/swap to black with 80 percent brand new parts from Mazda, cost me a small fortune but it looks like it just rolled off the assembly line..check out my interior restoration thread in the interior section of the forum.

so as you all can see my install turned out really good and i had a few requests from some other members that i turn this into a write up so its a good thing i took a lot of pics during the process so as soon as i get some spare time i will do a nice write up so others can get there kit to fit as good as mine. however i probably wont have the time until I'm done with the car. if been working from 9-5 5 days a week then going straight to my garage and working on this car for at least 3 hours every weekday. then on weekends i work on it for about 8 hours, so i have no time for anything else at this point. but keep an eye out for a write up. needless to say this car is wearing me down quickly, its hard to crawl outta bed in the morn..lol and my back is KILLING me..

regards to door dings- anyone else notice that the adhesive bonding the inner skins to the outer skins is starting to distort thier body parts?

I primed my hood and I noticed very slight dimples that were not visable when it was in its original paint, they were from the dabs of adhesive that bond the panels together. A little heat gun action and they popped out.

I think thats why my brand new door that I got from Mazda had a few waves in it, the waves are right under the door support areas- think im going to have to heat gun those as well to see if they pop.

As far as dings on the panels- I have been letting the paintless dent guy do his magic before I take the grinder and the stud gun and filler to things, with thier magic you can keep more of the car original- them doors are a bitch because they are not flat, they arc towards the fender and the 1/4 panel., center of the door is supposed to be lower then the edges, but if the door is THAT bad you just end up making it straight!

Hey you live close to me, maybe when I get my kit you can do mine:beerchug:

lol nah i dont think ill be doing anymore kits..they suck. and it took me like 16 hours of work to fit it..

^^^ I know the feeling. :)

john ny