Lower Grill replacement.

[Percy247]

About a month ago I suffered a bird strike. The female pheasant destroyed the lower grill but luckily did not damage the condensor. There are few videos online showing how to remove the bumper but non showing how to replace the lower grill. So I thought I would share my experiences.

1. Remove the front bumper. I followed a YT video, disconnecting the two electrical connectors. This is the easy part and takes about 15 mins. There is no need to remove the wheels or jack up the car. Place bumper on a rug or piece of carpet to minimise damaged. Remove fog light covers on either side of the grill.

2. Remove the flat section at the base of the bumper (that connects to the undertray when in place) by disconnecting all the plastic tabs.

3. Disconnect the wiring harness at the top of the grill and unplug the connectors to the parking sensors. Unplug and remove the air temperature sensor.

4. Using a jigsaw carefully cut through the vertical pieces of plastic in the old grill avoiding the piece of bumper that runs horizontally across the middle of the grill.This allows you to flex the old grill more. I then used a handful of flat headed screwdrivers to bend the plastic tabs on the old grill and wedge them open. There are over 50 of them! Using a combination of careful pressure and using a flat head screwdriver as a wedge I managed to separate the lower grill from the bumper in about an hour.

5. Fit the new grill. I would recommend buying a genuine part as the fit and quality will be a lot better. Being a tight Yorkshire git, I bought a cheap non genuine part. This needed a few extra tabs cutting off it and was a complete bitch to fit. Some areas went on fine whilst others needed careful brute force. In the end I got it on with only a few small scratches to the bumper. I would say quality of fit was about 80% of the original.

6. Replace bottom piece to bumper, refit and connect all wiring and refit bumper.

The lower grill is ridiculously over engineered and could be held in place with 6-8 screws instead of the 50 plus plastic tabs. It would be far simpler to replace the complete bumper as a single unit. All in, the job took me 2.5 hours, cost £35 and involved a few choice swear words!