How To Replace Front Bumper Cover 2001-07 Ford Escape

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In this video, we're going to show you how to remove and reinstall a front bumper cover. We're going to do it on this 2002 Ford Escape, same as most of the Escapes of this era. Tools you'll need are just a Philips screwdriver, a short stubby one will help, and a 10mm socket with a ratchet or wrench would work too.

You're going to remove a 10mm bolt here, and here, to start. Fast-forward here as I use a 10mm socket and ratchet to remove those two bolts. Pretty much, this is what I'll do throughout the video. I'll show you the step and then I'll kind of fast-forward through it. Now you can see I have the car raised up off the ground. You don't need to raise the car off the ground, and it just certainly makes it a lot easier to film.

There's going to be a series of Phillips clips. Here is one of the clips. Use your Phillips screw driver, lightly, and try and turn this. The center should come out. Then when the center comes out, the whole clip will pop out. There are three on the side here, and there are three on the other side, as well as a couple right up underneath your grille. Here again, we'll fast-forward as I remove the rest of those clips.

Okay, once you get those out, then there are two more. You pull this back. Okay, and it's probably a little difficult to see, but up in there, there is another one of those little Phillips clips. If you feel up in here with your hand, you'll feel the head of it. The best strategy for these is to just pull firmly down on them, and the clips will break free.

Now there are a series of 10mm bolts under here, one there, one there, and there's a few up under here. On the other side I'm going to fast-forward through removing these, and because these bolts are up underneath, a lot of times they're rusted from salt and sand and whatnot. They'll be difficult to get apart, and you could see as I went through in the previous shot. One of them was broken off. You may break one or two off, but do your best to get them out. One of them I actually go back, spray on some penetrate, wait, and see if the penetrating oil will help.

If you break one or two of them off, it's not the biggest thing. You can put it back together with just one or two of them missing. Then you can see, as I get the last bolt broken free, the bumper cover is about to basically come right off. You can see, I've got the bumper cover off now. If your vehicle does have fog lights, then at this point, before you pull the bumper cover too far off, you would want to reach inside and just disconnect each fog light.

Okay, I'm going to speed through this a little bit. At this point, the first thing you want to do is make sure that all your clips are out. Especially those clips you had to kind of reach up underneath make sure those are out of the bumper cover. Then, if you have fog lights, reconnect them. Have your two bolts ready for the top, and put the bumper cover back in place, and just finger-tighten those two top bolts to hold it.

Now, go up underneath and just make sure that the black lower fascia overlaps the gray part of the fascia. On my vehicle, the center bolt was still there, so I put that in and preliminarily tightened it up to hold things in place. Next, you're going to put all the clips back in, and you want to set them up like this. Have the screw just inserted a little bit so that you can push them in place. Then, obviously, do the ones up underneath first. Push them into the fascia first, and then up into the fender, and lock them in place.

Okay, and obviously repeat for the other side as well. Okay, keeping the work pace going, I'm going to put the clips up in underneath the grille. Then I'm going to start all the 10mm bolts for the bottom. Again, if one or two of them break, not a big deal. You can put it back together with what you have. It's pretty much inevitable that if you have a car with quite a few miles on it, that one or two of them will break.

Then, once you're done starting them in, tighten them up. Now here, I'm just putting the rest of those Phillips style pins back in that hold the sides of the wheel wells. Then finish off by tightening up the two top bolts on each side of the grille.

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