Hi folks,

I thought I'd post this tidbit of info, to contribute a bit, as I saw some posts and questions about this in the past.

I have an 84 sedan. Yesterday I was rear ended at low speed, smack. I was pissed at first because of all the effort I'm currently making to get my car to work and look as nice as possible. I wasn't as pissed when I looked because the rear bumper had maybe just a couple extra scratches on it from the impact. It did break half of the left bracket (that holds the cover's eyebrow to the body) that I had repaired in the past with superglue. I knew that probably would be fine for normal use but wouldn't hold an impact.

I could have attempted a fix with JB Weld but since my bumper cover was far from perfect looking already, I decided to hit the junkyard for a new cover and brackets. I knew they had a few early 80s cars. Turns out they got rid of most of them in about a week but still had an 85 with a better bumper than mine and perfect brackets, so I bought that one.

Going in I wasn't sure about the differences between early plastic bumpers (83-85) and late, 86 and up. There was a late car with a great looking bumper so I spent some time looking at it and a couple others.

The late ones are thicker, deeper, they stick out from the body of the car by an extra...maybe 1.5 inch.

I think that looks nicer personally. More Volvo-esque.

But it can't be installed on an early car directly. To accommodate that, the inside metal filler is not longer flat but has extra square channels. So one would have to get the filler as well.

To mount the filler, you would also need to get the bumper shocks/brackets. They mount with 4 bolts each instead of 2 2 bolts into each corrugation/square tube.

But that's not all. The bumper cover also sits about an inch lower on the body than earlier cars, so you'd have a gap. You would also need to get the bumper trim. The regular trim has an added black part at the bottom that covers the gap.

Personally, as much as I like the late bumper cover better, I think the trim looks cooky and a last minute thought.

Also, the cover mounts to the filler in a different manner, with different clips top and bottom, and the side brackets are different. I didn't see them up close and in detail but they seem beefier to me.

So, I thought I'd post that, especially since it will become harder to find a nice early bumper (and if you look online, you'll see that late ones are quite a bit cheaper as well):

I paid $25 for mine in the JY and it will look nice after I put some Forever Black on it.

In the future I might be tempted by doing the swap, but I don't like that trim, and it might look out of place compared to the front bumper...