[earossi]

I did a close inspection of the underside of my car this weekend, and found a number of places where there were cracks in the plastic skirting that form the front and rear lower bumpers and the skirting that is installed at the bottom of the door sills. All the material is there; but, there are a number of places where the plastic has cracked (probably from age and stress).



I am wondering what ways owners have come up with to repair these areas. Mostly they are around holes formed in the plastic for the fasteners that secure the cladding to the car. On the front bumper, many of the holes that attach the "batwing" pan are also cracked out. I did a search on the forum, but it did not turn up anything that would address how to repair these cracked areas short of replacing the skirts.

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[SILVY968]

On some of these areas I have used a brass plate. I drill the hole in the plate to serve as the "repaired" mounting hole and then pop rivet the brass plate to the plastic piece through two smaller hole that I drill in the plate. There are some places where this works well.

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[earossi]

Thaniks Brian. I had thought about that and will probably go that route if no one comes up with a glue that will work on this plastic. Hopefully someone will provide a solution. One of the reasons I didn't go the backing plate is that where the batwing joins up with the bumper, they are a line-to-line fit which will make the use of rivets or any other kind of mechanical fastener an issue at that seam. There's got to be some sort of solvent that will work on this material. I believe the material may be polyurathane, but I'm not certain.

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[Ryan]

I just tried a method for fixing the cracked sills and it appears to have worked well. Fiist of all I had some .040 Styrene that I cut in sections about 1.5" by the length of the crack. I drilled small holes all over the Styrene no more than .5" apart. I mixed up a batch of JB Weld and smeared it on the Styrene and then placed it over the crecked area. I used several small "C" clamps to hold it overnight. The JBWeld flows out the drilled holes and acts as a holding point. I had also used some medium sandpaper to rough up the sill surface foe glue adhesion. The Styrene has flex so it can be used on curved surfaces such as the sills. You can get Styrene at any plastics shop. You only have to score it and snap it in order to cut sections of it. Hope this helps. I didn't take pictues, but have another section to repair, so I will try at that point.

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