Lexmex

For those of you who have or know of the Toyota Harrier, of which the RX300 is almost an exact clone, you will no doubt know they don't have the side markers on the front and rear bumpers.

When I was in Jamaica, where the RX300 and Harrier are side by side, one can notice just a single white light just in front of both front doors, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Harrier_hongkong.jpg

I personally like no side lights and would prefer to have smooth sides. So as one of my final projects in Mexico, my cousins and I began work on Friday and will complete the work sometime Monday (after we get some paint, because unfortunately everyone is closed due to the religious holidays here).

However, let's take a look at the work in progress, since we only lack painting at the moment.

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First step in the progress is to get some soapy water and some fine grit sandpaper to remove the top layer where the original paint and some but not all of the bumps and bruises I have accumulated in my 6 years are. Here we start on the rear bumper.

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And this is what it looks like around the side marker area after we have finished this process.

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My cousin Antonio yanked this thing off, but that's okay, but it left the bolt of the side marker light left over and we eventually had to drill this out.

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Now peering through we seen the hole where the wire for the side marker light bulb go.

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Now, here I duct-taped the bulb up on the other side, but eventually will remove the wiring at a future date.

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Now Antonio did have to get the bolt we drilled out of the space behind the bumper, so we had to take off the small hex bolts here to reach around.

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Here is the bolt from the rear, and it is solidly stuck in the plastic as we will see later.

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Rear shot.

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Side shot of bolt.

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Other rear side marker, but Antonio actually reached around and got the wrench on it. It won't matter if you damage this area, as we will see later.

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However, in the process we still damaged the area where the bolt was as you can see on the right side of this piece, but we have a photo later of what it looks like on the front side markers with the bolt.

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And here is what remains.

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Antonio goes to work on the front side marker, this one being on the driver's side by where my lower air intake is.

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While we were doing that, work was completed on sanding down the rear bumper.