WHealy

I noticed that the upper half of the front grill is filled in. My question is, if that wasn’t filled in, what would be behind it? I assume part of the engine bay that was a base coat of exterior color and that’s why it’s filled in to simplify making it black.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

TIA

Gyro

Styrofoam.

The actual bumper runs horizontally right behind the solid black area your talking about. a layer of styrofoam in front of the bumper. The syrfo foam is to achieve the low impact rating.

If it not for the blacked out are in our grill, we would be looking at an igloo cooler.

Doctorr

You can see the two covered holes where the tie down hooks fit, they are on the ends of two big 'frame rails' that stick out and support the bumper in a crash. Between the square ends there is a white 'styrofoam' chunk for cushioning. Across the top of all this is the air intake tract, a fat ribbed hose.

All very ugly....
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doc

XeRo

yeh..i was going to actually "open" those holes up to increase air flow until I saw the front end taken apart on Rotaryextreme.com when they were doing their MS Kit fitment several months ago..

WHealy

Thanks for the info guys. A cooler look huh ... hum ... :D

After readong this I went back and look at the body kits curretnbly availble. i would have thought someone would have leveraged the small opening for a complety different look. Didn't see like anyone followed that path .. yet.

Nubo

Funny! I noticed the same thing when I went to (ahem) remove the front license plate frame. From pictures I'd always assumed that it was an ordinary grille and wondered about the "effect" of blocking it with the license plate. Duh!

BVD

It's been a few weeks since I took the front off my car, but from memory you could open up some of the lower blocked off lozenge shapes before you got to the ugly stuff.

My guess is that one reason for blocking off as many as they did was so that owners didn't fret about moving their licence plates to get more air flow.

As Nubo mentions, it's a common assumption that the plates must be blocking the air. I've had more than one helpful 'expert' advise me to remount the plate to get better airflow.

They tend to go quiet when you show them that in fact it's blocking nothing at all though. :p

Omicron

I've also wondered about this a bit. I think the grille is blocked at the top for both aesthetics, as has been discussed, and also to better direct airflow down to the radiator, which sits at a somewhat odd angle and lower than I'm used to seeing. I wonder if the top part of the radiator was open if it would result in overheating problems.

BVD

I also wondered about that, when I was thinking about replacing the front grille with one to match the metal ones I made to protect the oil cooler and the open air intake below.

The radiator that you can see from the front is actually the condenser for the air conditioner. The engine radiator sits behind that and does also go somewhat higher up past the condenser.

It's still in line behind some of the blocked lozenges, so I don't think that opening up the lower ones would cause any problems, either for view or airflow.

It also looked reasonably well cowled around the edges, so the limiting factor in the airflow is probably the rate at which the air can travel through both radiators (which have quite tight gaps) and then escape through a very crowded engine bay.

Air flow is a funny thing though, and it's all just guesswork on my part, but I couldn't see any obvious reason why opening up more space at the front would cause any difficulties.