So here’s a post that will matter very, very little to almost every single person who might read it. However, for the person to whom it does matter, it’s going to save them a lot of hassle.
If you need to replace or repaint the rear bumper on your Saab 9-5 (say, for instance someone hits your car in the parking lot where you work and doesn’t leave a note — classy, right?) and you want to do the work yourself, you are going to have a really hard time finding out how to get it off. First, you might remove the trim and look for other obvious attachments. You could open up the trunk and remove the rear light housing (which will be a useful skill, if, for example the same car that scratched up the bumper cracked the taillight), you could pull up the spare tire access and look all over for the right bolt to remove, look underneath the car, but you still won’t find them. Maybe at that point you’d do some serious googling and find exactly what you needed. If you’re lucky.
Instead of all those other places, all you need is to:
- Remove the two screws on either side of the car, just inside the wheel well, holding the corners of the bumper on.
- Open the trunk and inside on both sides just below the taillights, look for a flap of carpet that flips up to reveal metal frame and oblong styrafoam inserts. If you see the flaps, rejoice! Otherwise you’ll need to pull up the entire swatch of carpet (relish the sound of glue tearing as it comes up — you’ll be needing something to re-attach that later) to reveal the 3″ styrafoam blocks.
- Remove the upper-most insert, stick your head in the trunk to observe the nearly hidden nut which you need to remove. Unfortunately, the bolt is long enough that a standard socket won’t fit, and an extended socket is too long for the small opening the block came out of. You might have luck putting the socket on the nut, and then attaching the wrench to the socket. Loosen the bolt until you can use your fingers to unscrew it — being careful not to unscrew it too much as the wrench could become stuck.
- Repeat for the opposite side
- Remove bumper
Hey, what do you know! The manual says it’s an hour long operation for one person to remove the bumper completely and put it back on. Probably not a bad estimate — if you actually know how to do it.