stevec5000
New member
The heat here kills plastic parts in no time and the grill on my '04 started to crack horizontally on each side of the upper horizontal bar going across the front. Has anyone figured out what to do about that? I noticed the grill seemed a bit loose so I tried putting flat washers underneath the mounting screws to reinforce the sheet metal of the hood where the grill mounts but that didn't help much since it's only fastened across the top. There is a U shaped metal brace across the bottom and up the sides but it only goes up far enough to mount underneath 2 screws on each side. I took the grill off to examine it and found that it's mounted by some captive screws that have rectangular heads that just slide into some plastic clips on the back and several of them were broken. I filled up the open area the screw heads slide into with epoxy and glued the broken ones back in place. I also filled the open areas behind the screw mounting areas with epoxy to reinforce it. Now it seems stronger but I'm thinking that I should also epoxy the U shaped metal support into the plastic grill instead of relying on just 5 sheet metal screws to hold it. Has anyone done that?
