My 99 SC had someone run into it while parked. The corner of the front bumper under the headlight was hit so it ripped the cover and took a small area of the crash bar out. The parts are all discontinued but insurance is willing to pay for used parts and fix the car. I have a lead on the cover and foam. The crash bar is 52131-24050 specific to 97+ models. All of the info here on front end conversion to 97+ never mentions needing to replace the crash bar.

In other words, if you can convert to 97+ front bumper without replacing the crash bar on 92-96, then you should be able to put a 92-96 crash bar on a 97+ car.

True or false?

Did they just alter the thickness of the crash bar metal or something like that to save money on later model years?

The 97+ crash bars are harder to find than the bumper cover. There is a guy in town parting a 94 and will sell me the crash bar but I do not know if it will work.

 

My memory is fuzzy, but at one point I compared the crash bar from two different years and they were the same dimensions but the bolt hole placement differed slightly.

 

Thanks Khan. I am still struggling to find one. There are a few junker 97+ SCs within 300 miles for sale so I thought about buying, taking what I need, and parting/selling the donor car for cheap but most are in the $3K-$4K range which makes the math not work. I need a parts car that costs $1,500 or so to make it work.

 

car-parts site has a few 97+... Don't remember all the available location, but if you make the selection for your years, it should pull what you need. It appears 96 is the midway point between interchangeability. 91-96 and 97-2000

 

Thanks Tallyhoe. This part is a nightmare to acquire. If you call the yards listed on car-part they do not understand that the bumper cover and crash bar are two separate things. They will just search bumper in their inventory and say they do not have one. More than one guy told me there is no way to search for just the bar. The search "has to be for the bumper assembly". I want to smack the engineer that decided to change the design of this part. He cost Toyota the additional costs to retool and configure the equipment in the factory and now over 25 years later he has created a problem for me.

 

^^ All t2d2's and Tallyhoe's knowledge here I'm learning about this from them as well should I ever need to do this

I hope you can locate a good example soon to set your car right. Such a simple chassis part and you're having such difficulty finding one :/

 

Did you try giving them the part number?? You reminded me of this salvage yard I went asking for an S2000, and they said it didn't exist, and that I was making it up. Their nighbor a smog place wouldn't smog my MR2, because Toyota never put a turbo on a car. This was back in '08, lol.

Either way I would take a gamble on either one. Body shop wil either expand or fill a hole.

 

Sadly I have heard similar stories of similarly completely ignorant smog shops in California trying to turn people away because of claims that a factory stock performance model either didn't come equipped and configured the way it actually DID come equipped and configured from the factory... or that some model doesn't even exist.

All these models are right there in their BAR97 smog computer databases to look up.

 

The problem with car-part.com searches is, what their system shows has little in common with what the yards have in stock. Some of it's just old inventory, with no common reporting system to remove it from the global searches, while others the yards have no idea how it even got in the system.

At best, it's a starting point for more research.

Also, they're not working with detailed schematics and categories, so things like bumper skins vs assemblies vs support structures is like talking a foreign language. They're just checking a few boxes in the database, most likely, for some good parts each vehicle contains. To test this out, go to the website of a yard you know, search for a couple known vehicles of the same make and model in stock, trying different categories, and see how inconsistent the results are. Then go pay for a few of the parts at the counter and see how little gets updated as far as what the vehicle no longer contains for the next person searching.

 

YES YES and YES. The cars they have in their database have been crushed long ago. I found that most yards do not care to deal in old low volume cars and will dispose of the car to make room for some newer high volume model like a Camry instead because they can make a lot more money from it. The Lexus SC parts customer is a rare bird. One sales guy at a yard told me something this old is worth more to them in scrap metal than letting it sit for years and maybe selling a few parts from it.

The search has gotten so ridiculous that I am considering "overnight parts from Japan" to get:

52119-24914
52611-24030
52131-24050

Amayama online says they have the foam and crash bar.
Partsouq online says the foam, crash bar, and bumper cover are all gone for good.
Toyotadxb online claims to have the foam, crash bar, and bumper cover but it seems too good to be true so I am skeptical.

I sent email to a dealer in Canada that also shows all three parts as available online.

The junker 97+ SC3/4s that I was looking at all sold on Facebook marketplace within 5-7 days. List price was $3K-4K. I have no way of knowing the actual sales price but people are buying these up if they are cheap running cars. My problem is closing the insurance claim. If the repairs run higher than estimated when the car is disassembled, I will be in a bad spot if I take what they are offering now and close the claim. If this was not a thing, I have garage space where I could dry dock the car for an indefinite time until I found the parts.

 

You know... I'm not sure why I didn't think of this earlier, but the two crash bars I compared are probably from the two cars I parted, the second of which was a '97. I'll look around in the morning to see if I still have it stashed somewhere.

The prices you're seeing are crazy. I rarely see SCs for sale or driving around any more, but when I sold my '94 and '95 M/T it took quite a while to find buyers in the $3-5k range, both being strong runners. I bought both of my parts cars for $700 each, as I recall. The '97 was a black on black with near-mint interior and body kit (do the math...), but crap engine and glass. It was like the bizarro world of SCs, with the reliable stuff trashed and the high wear stuff impeccable. When I had everything I wanted off them, they were quick sells for $100-300 as stripped down drift chassis.

 

Well, I only managed to find one of them. No part number on it, but it has the VIN sticker still and it's a '95.

 

I may have found a 97 part out locally, would you like me to go source parts, and we'll negotiate later? I still have to go and see how much is left.

 

Yes please. Thank You.
Actually, thanks for everyone in the thread.

 

Thanks for looking.