1936 Bumper straightening

[groselle]

The front bumper for my 1936 Special has hit something in its past life and it now has a slight bend in it. Has anyone tried straightening bumpers. It looks like I could give it a gentle push with my hydraulic press to put it back into shape. My fear is that it will break instead of bend. Any thoughts?

[JoelsBuicks]

Hi Greg, I straightened a slight bend on one of my 36 bumpers and also did it on a 38 bumper with great success. I'm assuming it is not a kink type bend but rather gentle and over a fairly long span. Here is what I did: realizing that the cross-section of the bumper looks like this ( I used large C-clamps with wood buffers to put lots of force on restoring the ( shape because it was slightly flared out. Then, I blocked up the ends of the bumper with the bumper laying face down and did some jumping on the middle to bring back the slight concaveness of the bumper. It worked very well and success came after I first failed by just jumping on it - it really needed those c-clamps to reverse that flare-out caused by the initial hit.

On another 38 bumper - I successfully beat out a kink using heat. No break. I've got two other bumpers - a 36 and a 37 that are completely broken so there is some propensity to break.