When I bought my truck one the previous owner's had taken the rear bumper off. I want to put a rear bumper back on and need to find one. Are there any of the manufacturers producing quality metal and chrome? I want a chrome bumper not painted. It's almost imposible to find a NOS chrome bumper and finding an original in good shape and re-chroming seems cost prohibitive.
dont know about the quality of these bumpers, but I like this company: http://www.cl***icparts.com/Bumpers/products/161/
I managed to find a nicely re-chromed original on e-bay a few years ago. As far as the repro bumpers, I don't know. I hope they are a better quality than some of the other chromed repro **** I've bought. If you come across a good original keep in mind that the Fleetside and the Stepside bumpers are different and use different brackets.
good luck finding a new one that's not a thin made in china pos. The upside is that now that they repop them so cheap, some guys who don't know this are buying new, getting rid of their old originals. Hopefully they are not throwing them in the trash!
I bought a repro chrome rear bumper for a 56 Chevy stepside from ChevyDuty a few years back. It fit well and looked really good, I had no complaints with it.
I think the repop quality depends on where you get it. I've heard some people say their bumpers started rusting in a year and others say they were like new five years later. But you are miles ahead with a decent factory piece over a brand new repop. Factory chrome will last for DECADES as long as you take care of it. I found a factory chrome bumper for my '55 stepside. It's in decent shape with just some scratches, but no rust on the front or the back and the chrome is more than decent. I'm going to work on polishing it up and get it as nice as I can. I think I read somewhere that the reason so much of the repop chrome ****s is because they skip one of the steps in the plating process. Maybe the copper? Maybe because it's expensive? I think that may be it, it's been a while.
It is simply a matter of plating thickness and adhesion. Many modern repops (not all) have much thinner nickel plating than factory pieces received when new. I have replated ****py modern repops of many different parts, and am amazed at how thin the plating is. To get thicker (more durable) plating, it takes more time in the tanks; therefore it saves the repop plater time and money to put as little plating on the parts as they can get away with, in order to get more units plated in a given work day. Adhesion issues are caused by one or more of a hundred little things that can go wrong in the plating process. Many times adhesion issues don't show until a whole boatload of bumpers are shipped out to the distributor, or later. I have only seen high end vehicles come with copper plated bumpers from the factory; like some Cadillac, Imperial, and some European stuff. Corvettes, for instance never had copper plated bumpers originally, from 53-73, at least in my experience replating "virgin" bumpers (but the original nickel plating thickness is more than respectable.) At this point, original plating on anything HAMB-aged is getting pretty rare.
some older chrome ****ed to. In 1952 there was a lack of nickel due to the korean war which lead to some less then perfect chrome (found this out when I was working on my 52 chevy car). sorry...not really on topic...found this thread when looking up info on 55-59 chevy truck bumpers.
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