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20 Posts
Hello guys –
I am new to the forum but I have owned my ’04 XE for about four years and I have lurked on here from time to time. I recently tackled the project of replacing the rusted out front radiator core support. I live in Michigan and the salt obviously got to it – the radiator was about to fall out of the car!
Anyway, I know this is a common problem on 01-04 X’s and I was surprised that nobody sells a replacement piece other than the entire front radiator support assembly. I did find a few sites that had just the support piece for sale, but all of them were either out of stock or unavailable so it seems as though you can no longer buy just this piece.
I briefly considered buying the entire assembly an just cutting out the spot welds to obtain the piece I needed, but that seemed like a waste and I have also heard that these parts are made from thin gauge sheet metal which will just rust out again in a couple years so I decided to fabricate my own from stainless.
The welded assembly I created turned out well and fits great, but it got me thinking – this piece could be made from a single piece of laser cut and bent stainless. I went ahead and modeled the part. A screen shot is below.
My question is, would anyone be interested in buying these? I have not yet gotten a production quote but that would greatly depend on purchase quantity so it’s hard to say what they would cost. I’m going to say somewhere between $100 and $200.
I’m just trying to gauge interest – I already put the engineering time into it so I figured I might be able to help out others as well as recoup some of my development costs!
I am new to the forum but I have owned my ’04 XE for about four years and I have lurked on here from time to time. I recently tackled the project of replacing the rusted out front radiator core support. I live in Michigan and the salt obviously got to it – the radiator was about to fall out of the car!
Anyway, I know this is a common problem on 01-04 X’s and I was surprised that nobody sells a replacement piece other than the entire front radiator support assembly. I did find a few sites that had just the support piece for sale, but all of them were either out of stock or unavailable so it seems as though you can no longer buy just this piece.
I briefly considered buying the entire assembly an just cutting out the spot welds to obtain the piece I needed, but that seemed like a waste and I have also heard that these parts are made from thin gauge sheet metal which will just rust out again in a couple years so I decided to fabricate my own from stainless.
The welded assembly I created turned out well and fits great, but it got me thinking – this piece could be made from a single piece of laser cut and bent stainless. I went ahead and modeled the part. A screen shot is below.
My question is, would anyone be interested in buying these? I have not yet gotten a production quote but that would greatly depend on purchase quantity so it’s hard to say what they would cost. I’m going to say somewhere between $100 and $200.
I’m just trying to gauge interest – I already put the engineering time into it so I figured I might be able to help out others as well as recoup some of my development costs!





