How to Remove Bumper 2006-12 Nissan Altima

Hey, friends. It's Len down at 1A Auto. Today I'm going to show you something fairly simple. We're going to be removing a bumper cover on a 2010 Nissan Altima. It's going to be easy. I'm going to be the guy who shows you how to do it. And if you need any parts you can always come down to 1aauto.com. Thanks.

All right so we're going to start removing this bumper cover. It's going to be very simple. I'm going to guide you through it. We're going to start on the top since we're already still on the ground. We're going to remove a couple of these pins right here, here, here, here, here and here. And then we'll continue onto the next steps. You'll need a couple of basic tools. You might need all or any of these tools but here we go. We'll start with the little forky looking one. Stick it under here, pry it up, and we'll put it someplace safe where we won't lose it. Continue on along the line. Sometimes these might break, it happens, you can replace it if you want. I'll find that later, move along here, I'm just going to pry up on this a little bit and I can use my fork again. I'm just going to pop it up. These right here are called push clips, so what happens is the center pulls up and it disengages the lock. When you go to put this back in, you push the bottom part in first. Plug the hole. Then you shove this in and it spreads this and locks it in.

Put that aside so we don't lose it. We're going to continue down the line. Just get it started. Use our little fork device here. Lift up on that push-pin. We're going to continue along. See if we can get under it, and onto the next. Just give it a little tug. Make sure that we got them all out. It's possible to miss one, it happens, it human nature to make mistakes. I think we're good to move onto the next step which will be raising the vehicle up a little bit so we can get a look at what's underneath and see what else is holding it on.

So one thing that I did want to mention even thought we just finished taking all these outs. We'll just put one more in real quick. We'll leave it in there until we've got everything else unattached so when we're underneath the vehicle, we don't have to worry about it coming down and hurting us. So I'd like to take note that there is a mounting bolt for the bumper cover right under here. It's a simple 10 millimeter head. You can use a ratchet and socket if you want, or a ratchet wench--whatever you're into. 10 millimeter, we can go ahead and turn that counterclockwise to reverse it out. Once we get this completely out, we'll go over the other side of the vehicle and we'll remove that one the same way. Here's what it looks like. We'll put that safely aside so we don't lose it. And off we go.

Next we're going to go ahead and remove our seven millimeter head bolts right here. They come across. They'll come across here if the rest of the splash shield was here. So you can use a ratchet, or if you happen to have a little electric gun that would work as well. Once we get all these off, we can go ahead and remove the push clips. Get this right out of the way, and then we can get going on removing the rest of this bumper. Put a little downward force on it if you want, making sure wearing safety glasses in case anything comes falling down. There we are.

Something fell down. Now we're clear to start removing these push clips--same as the top. You just pull out the top end of it and then the bottom should come out as well, use our screwdrivers that we were using before. Might find a little. Just want to get it pried up a little bit so we can grab it with our other tool there.

So we can continue with our little hook tool if we want, or we can go ahead and use some cutters. You might find it easier to just grab onto it with some cutters and pull it out. Grab on, you don't need to squeeze too hard, we're not trying to cut it--just break it free. Making sure you hold the splash shield so it doesn't fall down and hit you in the face. We're going to do the same for the other one. Come over and grab it with our cutters nice and light. Break it free. Separated, that's okay. I'm just going to pull down. Now we're clear to put these back together, and we'll set them aside so we don't lose them.

Now we're going to take our Phillips head screwdriver or whatever you might have, but it's a Phillips head on this. We're going to reverse all these bolts out or screws. It's going to come right along here. We don't need to worry about those but right here, right here, right here, and then it should come free. Now we'll go back up top, and we'll dislodge it, and it should come right off. Last one. These removed. We're just going to give it a little shake. We don't want to take it completely off. All right, now we're clear to get back up to the top, we'll take out that one last pin that I showed you leaving in and this should come right off.

So we're back up top to our last pin that we pressed in there. We're going to do it just we did before and break it free. Like that. At this point, once we get this out, the bumper cover might come loose so you want to make sure you have it secured. Just lift this up and out. We'll put it over here. Grab onto it. It should come free. Now we've successfully removed our bumper cover.

All right, now it's time to install our bumper cover. We're going to be careful not to rub against our fenders with it unless you don't care about your paint. I'm going to try hard though. See if we can get it settled in nice and easy. Just get that down along there. I'll worry about pressing it in in a minute. Just going to get it lined along the top here. So we're going to get this lined up. We want to try to get this hole lined up under there. This one with there, this one there and so on. If you need to you can use a little bit of your body force. We have two different types of clips here. We have regular push clips and then the locking push clips. You can count them.

There's two that are locking, four that are regular and they're different sizes. This right here is much wider than the other ones so they go in the bigger holes. We're going to put it, the two: this one right here, and the second one right here. These are the two bigger holes. If you wanted to, you can latch them down. Not going to worry about it yet. I'm going to try to get these lined up. Just give it a little push. That locked in. Come on over, the next one should just press in hopefully. Sometimes it's hard getting things lined up. There it is. Come along, we've got two more holes. That's nice. See if I can get it in.

If you needed to, you could use maybe a small hammer or whatever you got if you don't have the thumb strength for it. That's okay. All right, so we got all these, now I can go ahead and lock these down simply by pushing in the centers. Can line up the bumper along the headlights, might do a little bit of finagling here and I tried to get it right along the seem of the fender. There's a little lip under there where it's black. See if we can get it popped in. Looks like we need to give it a little bit of a tug to pull it. There we go. Some brute force will do the same thing for the other side--then we'll be clear to lift this up and we can put in our two screws and then go along the bottom and fill those in as well.

Let's see. All right, so we have our little hidden screw holes here. See if I can get it off--our screw, 10 millimeter bolt head in case we don't remember, that's okay. I'm just going to try to get it lined up. We are only screwing into plastic. Any time you hear that, just remember you don't have to go super tight. It's just to secure it in. That feels pretty good. We can go ahead and push this up in here. Then we're just going to go on until the other side. We'll finish up with the bumper skirt--should be all set. So here we go. We're going to grab this plastic--it's going to go underneath the plastic of your bumper or bumper cover I guess. Your bumper would be the metal part. Want to get that lined up. If these things look like they're misaligned with the holes, they just move fairly easily. Then we can line them up, take a peak. Of course the first one I put in moved a little bit--that's okay. Like I said, they move fairly easily. That looks good now. Okay.

Take our three Phillips heads on our screwdriver. We're just screwing into plastic so you don't have to go hard, like I keep saying. Let's get these in. Down the line. There we are. Now we'll do the same on the other side, and we can move on. So we have our splash shield. Let's say for some reason maybe you lost the clips that go up here, you lost the push pins or even you just didn't have any. And you just need to replace them. If you don't have any replacements, what we could do is use a couple of zip ties. And the way we're going to do that, if you have access to something like this, you can go ahead and make a hole or something like that; you can use a drill bit if you wanted to do that. Could use anything that you wanted to use to make a hole really. Very carefully use a pocket knife. For me, I'm just going to go ahead and use this. I got it nice and hot. I'm going to go like this: just rest it on there and melt myself a nice little hole. There's one.

You don't want to breathe in these fumes. I'm sure it's known to the State of California cause cancer. There we are. Now we've got holes. Go ahead and turn this off, and let it finish doing what it's doing: smoke clouds. So now we can go ahead and match this up, bring it up here, looks fairly good, so we can use our zip ties, it's going to be hard getting the first one started and be flopping around. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to get it started down here and go through, and then I'm going to bring it back through. If you wanted to, you could use bigger zip ties, but something a little stronger might be better.

For what I'm doing, I'm just going to do this. Let's see. Let's go this way. That makes more sense doesn't it. Bring it through, just get it started, we don't need to tighten it up yet. Now we can just let this hang down, we can grab our other zip ties, continue on. And I'll leave them loose until we get in our push pins. Get it lined up with the hole, push it right in. We got our last one, see if we can get it up in there, take our center push pin, lock it up in. There we go. Now we can go ahead and tighten these down. We'll just go down the line. Can leave them down if you like that, trim them off if you don't. Kind of looks like a neat little thing but there we go.

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