GM's 69 Enduro Bumper Commercial
 

Great commercial from a FB Page

https://www.facebook.com/musclecarjr...1365307548258/

There's some great period content over at the CRG YouTube channel too:
https://www.youtube.com/user/CamaroResearchGroup/videos

Hey Tim, try this on your VE3 and let me know how it turns out !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZNNu1YuQ6c


:no:

That's funny. Can't make out the guy's face, but geez the voice is familiar...... famous actor maybe?

We talked about this before.That's actor Paul Richards. https://www.thesupercarregistry.com/...=152501&page=2

The original Endura bumper design was developed by GM's Inland Manufacturing. The original closed cell urethane over steel construction began in 1964 when they fabricated some push bumpers to be used when moving non-running cars around the Pontiac engineering garage. The first use of the material was on the 1967 Pontiac arrowhead emblems. Then came the design for the 1968 GTO, which used a steel inner frame with a closed cell urethane injection molding with a coat of urethane paint.

The Inland Manufacturing development car, their test mule, was a 1967 Camaro. Inland built a 'hoop' style front bumper that surrounded the entire grille, with 4-headlights, in preparation for the design of the 1968 GTO.

The use of Endura was revolutionary. Not only for the impact properties, but because it was body-colored. After 1968, manufacturers began using body-colored bumpers, some of them Endura, some were urethane paint over a steel core, some simply urethane paint sprayed over a blank bumper. Within a few years, many performance cars adopted the body-colored bumper, including the Firebird, Corvette, and Mustang, and by the late 1970's nearly every sporty car had body-colored bumpers.

Mike

The '69 Camaro VE3 bumper was a poor, flimsy design. Just about any contact would bend it. It was not well sealed against the elements so the steel liner quickly rusted. Had a number of them in my parts car days. I would save the brackets and jack adapter, toss the now-floppy bumper. The outer bracket hardware was often too rusted to remove. In my 44 years in the hobby, only seen a few NOS VE3 bumpers.

For some reason, Chevy did not use the 'Endura' trade name in marketing the option. The US showroom brochure refers to it as the 'color-matched' bumper; the Canadian brochure calls it the 'Astro' bumper. Factory docs list it as 'Special Front Bumper.'

No matter, one of the coolest '69 options. A bud owned one of the very few Yenkos built with a VE3 bumper.

The VE3 does look cool though!

The original name of Pontiac's Endura was Indura. Inland Manufacturing put an "In" of front of nearly all their products, but Pontiac didn't want their bumpers to be marketed for another GM division so they changed Indura to Endura. Inland manufactured dozens and dozens of products for GM, including weatherstrips, steering wheels, etc.

Flexible urethane covers and fillers began to appear on many 1974-later cars, usually in the area between one of those huge chrome bumpers and the fender. Production of the flexible urethane cover was transferred over to GM's Guide Lamp later, and full flexible urethane fascias appeared on the Corvette and Firebird in the late 1970's.

Endura died a quiet death on the 1978 Firebird, and for 1979 Pontiac switched to the flexible urethane fascias that were commonplace in the 1980's and beyond.

Mike

So Mike, are you saying that the 1978 Firebird (and Trans Am I guess?) were the last to use the Endura bumper? My 1978 TA had the regular (and later) bumper with the urethane cover, and I never saw the Endura bumper on it. Was it only early models or something else? Just curious.

Mark, they officially still referred to it as Endura through 1977-1978, but as we discovered, Pontiac basically tagged the name 'Endura' to anything that was urethane coated and could absorb a impact. The official Pontiac description for the 1977 nose was. "Sandwiched between the RIM fascia and steel reinforcement is either an energy absorbing device made from low-density cast urethane foam or from a thermoplastic material injection molded into a honeycomb pattern.”

So the 1977-1978 Birds had a flexible urethane fascia with with molded thermoplastic injected material to allow the soft fascia to hold its form. The 1979's had the redesigned nose where the grilles were under the headlights, and the flexibility of that fascia was much more apparent especially to the left and right of the Pontiac arrowhead emblem.

Bumpers today use the same basic design. a soft fascia with a molded, injected material behind it to hold its form.