Created on: 2019-05-10
Watch this video to learn how to remove and replace a worn, faded, or damaged bumper cover on your 97-05 Lexus GS300. 1AAuto experts will show you how!
Socket Extensions
Plastic Fastener Remover
10mm Socket
Ratchet
Hey, everyone. This is Len from 1A Auto. Today, I'm going to show you how to remove and replace your front bumper cover in case you ever need to get to your headlight assemblies, your horn assemblies, pretty much anything that's behind here. I'm going to show you how to get this off and if you need this part or any other part, you can always come down to 1aauto.com and we'll be sure to take care of any of your needs. We're going to start removing the 10 bolts that are under here. They're 10 millimeters. A couple of them are missing. So we'll just skip onto the next. Got them right here. Very simple. This is what it's going to look like. There should be 10 of them under here. Let's go all the way around. Here's the last one. All right. Put those all safely so we won't lose any more. Now we can pull this down. As you can see, it comes down quite a bit, which is perfect. Watch your eyes for any falling debris. I'm going to pull this down a little bit out of the way.
Behind here, you'll notice there's a fog light. So that means there must be a wiring harness that leads to it. We'll take a look up in there. I don't know if you can see it with the camera or if I can see it without the camera. If you can't get the wiring harness off, you can also just try to remove the whole bulb assembly from the unit itself. Here we go. Remove that, being careful not to mess up the filament or the bulb. You don't need to touch any of this glass. Any type of oils or anything could become an issue. It's going to decrease the life of your bulb. On the inside up here, we have a marker light on the side. So that means that inside, there's going to be another little harness. You can either disconnect the harness or just remove the whole unit from the assembly itself and then we're going to go over to the other side and do the same exact thing. All right, so now that we've got those 10 out, we've got the bulbs and everything disconnected. I wanted to show you up inside here.
Right there, there's another 10 millimeter head screw. We're going to use our 10 millimeter socket. Put it on there. If you have an extension, that would be great. Turn it to the left. You're going to remove that fully and then we're going to work our way over to the other side and do the exact same operation. As you can see, it's the same as the other 10 that we removed. So you don't have to keep it separate. It'll match up with all the rest of them. Continuing with our 10 millimeter socket, we're going to continue to remove these four screws, one, two, three, four, starting on one side and working your way over. All right, last one. There we go. All right, here we go. We're going to give this a yank, being careful because it's only plastic. Let's see. I'm going to come around to the other side, see if I can break this free and maybe it'll help get that side free. Here we go. It seems to be ... Whatever's going on is going on just in this corner. I'm going to come around. There's nothing there and there we go.
Now we're going to put this bumper assembly aside. It's just a plastic cover. We'll put it someplace so hopefully it won't get too scratched up.
All right, so now we're going to go ahead and start putting this bumper cover back on, being very careful not to scratch our lenses with any plastic. Just try to come up and over. We're going to just set it on there just like that. Hold it with your leg if you can. Just try to get everything kind of set up so it's pretty close and then we're going to go ahead and grab our bolts. Get this going. That looks good. I'm going to grab my bolts and we'll move onto the next step. All right, so taking some of our fine pitch bolts right here with a 10 millimeter head, we're going to go ahead and line up our holes. As you can see, it lines up pretty well. Put it in there. Try to get it a little bit started. Let's see. I need to give a little push to give it a little coercion. It should start screwing right in. That feels good. Just get it started. So we're going to want to line up the rest of the holes. Off of there. Move onto our next hole, once again lining up the hole.
Start it in. All right. Those are coming along good. Then we're just going to move along to the other side, doing the same exact thing. Now that I tightened up the other two, I'm going to go ahead and start tightening all of them down. That feels good. We're just screwing into plastic here. So you don't have to tighten it down too much. It feels good and we're going to move along to the other side and do the exact same thing. All right, so now we're going to start the hidden bumper bolt in. See if I can get it lined up with the hole and turn it to the right. It should screw right in. All right, leaving it fairly loose, so in case we have to maneuver the bumper at all. We'll just have to remember that we need to go back in and tighten that puppy up. Next, I'm going to go over the other side, do the exact same thing.
All right, now that we have the upper part of the plastic bumper mounted in, we're going to go ahead and reinstall the bulbs that we had removed, one for the fog light and one for the marker light on the side of the bumper there. So we're going to take it and come from behind, always with safety glasses so nothing falls in your eyes. I should bring it back down. I'm going to show you. There's three prongs. There's going to be three holes inside the fog light assembly. So we're going to try to line those up. If you can't get it right off the bat, that's fine. Just keep spinning it. At some point, it will line up. Let's see. There we go. There's one. Next, we're going to grab the marker light assembly. We're going to stick it up in there and do the same exact thing. We're going to try to line up those holes. Latches right in. Now we've got that done, we're going to move on over to the other side of the vehicle and finish up those bulbs.
We'll make sure they work and then we'll go ahead and mount up this undercarriage shield. All right, so now it's time to start installing the bolts that we have for the bottom side of this shielding system. What you're going to notice is that it has a little clip on this one and should have one here. It's doesn't. But we'll just go with what we've got. We're going to slide this piece into that clip right there. If there was one here, we would put it there. But since it doesn't have it, we'll just put it above the plastic part of the fender of the bumper cover. We're going to slide it in. It clips in and then we're going to take our 10 millimeter head bolt. We're just going to start it in there and we're going to go all the way along the whole lower area of this and we're gonna put in our bolts everywhere that we took one out. Get that started. All right. Good to go.
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