Manufacturing a sports grille for your rubber bumper project.

Photos courtesy of Jim McGlynn (This article on Jim's site)

The cheapest route is to get a good second-hand grille as new ones are around £80.  Mine was about £20 (2004) from the Welsh MG Centre.  The reason, as mentioned elsewhere for modifying the grille is that if you choose to leave the bumper plates in place and not cut the chassis rails back, then the grille in standard form is too thick and will sit out too far at the bottom. Jim had cut back his chassis rails, but obviously fancied the sports grille look.  The grille that Jim converted is a V8 grille, although in my case it was an earlier aluminium slatted grille, but the theory is the same.  The important thing is to get a grille with a good surround that will polish up well with a tube of AutoSol.  It is even possible to spray the grille surround to match the colour of the car and to use a s/s mesh (in the style of the Jaguar R type or MG Zed range).

The first step is to disassemble the grille and remove the inner section, be it the honeycomb black plastic or aluminium slats.  This will leave you with the frame.  You may need to drill out some rivets as well as undo some screws.  The inner upper right with the badge could also be removed, in theory and left off, although you would have two small holes in the top of the surround which would need filling.

The grille is shown below disassembled.

The mesh is most easily obtained from any motor factors, although the mesh I used was from Halfords at a reasonable price of £17 with enough to do both the grille and the vents in the valence.  The shinier diamond mesh is a little more expensive and does hide the wiring and chassis rails etc as well as the aluminium mesh Jim and I used.  However, I think the mesh I used is probably only 50% at best in terms of airflow, and hence I may look at using the s/s diamond mesh instead.  Also, it should be noted that the mesh we used is slanted, by that I mean the mesh in one orientation will allow you to look down through it, but in the other you would look up through it.  For the grille, the best orientation is to ensure the mesh is mounted so that you would look up through when stood in front of the car, thus it nicely hides all the bits behind.

The mesh is fairly simple to cut with a pair of tin snips, and essentially you cut out a section that is about 1" (25mm) bigger than the actual aperture.  This will allow you to fold it over as shown below.  The apertures are either big enough for rivets or may need enlarging slightly to allow a bolt through. as shown in the two photos below.

As you can see in the photo below, the grille is now very much thinner than the original and will allow it to be mounted up against the bumper plates without it sticking out too far.

And there it is, the finished product, the job should be fairly simple and take less than an hour to complete.  The finishing touch is the worthwhile purchase of a new badge (a few £'s only) if you have bought a second hand grille, and a good coat of polish should have it looking as new, ready to fit using the standard grille fitting kit to include the three top brackets. See this page for how I fitted my grille.

The standard grille fitting kit is shown below available from all MG specialists, including the three top brackets and screws etc.

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