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DIY - 2001 Camry XLE, remove and re-paint the front Grill

29K views 18 replies 10 participants last post by  AmanO 
#1 · (Edited)
This DIY is for a 2001 Camry XLE, but should work pretty much for any Gen 4 model, and might work for Gen3 models as well, but YMMV.

After a while the front grill gets to be looking a bit worn and tattered. Rock chips and other debris from the road tend to nick the paint, especially at high speeds. The weather plays a big part in the paint fading as well. So I decided it might be a worthwhile project to remove the grill, sand it down to the bare primer, and give it a few new coats of paint.

To remove the grill, you need to unloosen three 10mm bolts as can be seen here. Be sure to keep them in the orientation that you removed them. They are not the same !!




Here you can see the difference between the bolts. The one in the center position has a thinner shoulder than the two on the outside. Don't ask me why Toyota did this, but if you mix them up, you will crack the plastic tabs when you re-tighten the bolts. Keep them separate and marked.





Once the bolts are removed you need to release two clips at the bottom of the grill. If you look at the bottom of the grill, you will see U-shaped castings that slip over the Bumper Cover. Now you might think that these somehow hold the grill to the Bumper Cover. Well, you would be wrong.

All they do is to align the grill with the Bumper Cover. The real holding points are kinda hidden and are not all that obvious. But if you look, you will see two tabs centered between the U-shaped castings.

These are what hold the grill in place. Press down lightly on the Bumper Cover just behind this tab and you should hear a faint "click" as the tab releases. Do the same to the one on the other side, and the grill should swing towards the radiator, and you can remove it from the car. It's a
bit fiddly finding the right way to position the grill, but it will come right out.

The bottom picture shows the locking tabs and the U-shaped castings from underneath. Once the grill is removed, you can see where everything goes looking at the Bumper Cover without the grill in place.





With the grill removed you can now remove the Toyota emblem. With the grill face down, you will see two large clips, and one small hard to see clip centered in the rear of the emblem. Take a medium sized screwdriver and position it *exactly* in the center of the cavity. There is a boss cast into the emblem mounting hole, centered right where this small tab is, to pry against. If you don't center the screwdriver exactly, you will likely crack the housing, so be careful.

With the screwdriver positioned against the oval casting, pry _gently_ against the tab. It doesn't take too much pressure, and it needs to be a steady pressure, not a yank or jerking motion. The tab will release, and the emblem can be easily removed.





There's a lot of nooks and crannies in this grill so you will need to take your time and tape all the chrome parts. I started with 1/8" tape carefull tucking it into the rounded over parts. Once that was done, I came back with 1/2" tape and covered all the chrome parts. Using ordinary bond copier paper, I cut various pieces to fit in and around the different parts of the grill. Lots of cutting and taping as you can see in the next to the bottom pic.





I needed some way to get into all of the openings in the grill. I fabricated a sanding stick from some wood I had laying around. You could also use a paint mixing stick from Home Depot, or maybe a tongue depressor.

Whatever you decide on get some double stick tape, and tape some 120 grit sandpaper to it, and go over every part of the grill. The sandpaper will fill up quickly with paint, so have a brush handy to clean it up. Then switch to 180 grit, but I didn't use the sanding stick with the finer grits. The 120 grit on the sanding stick is pretty aggressive and was to remove most of the paint. Along with removing the paint, it will leave deep scratches which must be removed. I just wrapped the finer grit sandpaper around my index finger, and used a left and right motion to remove the scratches left by the
120 grip sandpaper. Using your fingers, or a sponge backing pad helps round the rounded edges of the grill to smooth them out. I started with 180 grit then 220, then 300 grit and finally 400 grit to finish off everything. It's sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but any body shop guy will tell you that the preparation is what separates a good paint job over a bad one. So take
your time, get into all the nooks and crannies and make every part of that grill smooth to the touch when you run your fingers accross it.

After all the sanding is done, blow off all the excess dust, and wipe down every part of the grill with some Acetone on a terry cloth rag. One more blast of compressed air to get rid of any Acetone, and lingering debris and you are ready to paint the grill.





I found some of this paint at a local surplus store and it looked pretty much like the original paint. You can probably get something very close to it at Autozone, or maybe you local dealer might have an exact match. To be honest, pretty much any paint color that suits you fancy will work fine. It's your car, paint it the color you want. But this Phantom Grey Pearl worked very nicely.

I sprayed on three light coats, letting each dry 20 minutes between coats. After the third coat had set up, I went over all the painted surfaces with some 0000 steel wool. Then two more coats and I let it dry for another 2 hours in the direct sunlight.





Once the paint was dry, I removed all of the tape, and cleaned up any over spray on the chrome parts. And then snapped in the Toyota emblem.





And here's how it looked all painted, cleaned up, and back in the car. :D





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#5 ·
Added to the stickied DIY thread.
 
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#9 ·
M front grill (2001 camry) is broken near the driver's side bolt. Where can I buy a good after market replacement front grill? This really needs not to be oem and any quality replacement should be fine? I see several choices upon google, but don't know which one to go with. thanks.
 
#10 ·
Bump. Anybody can recommend a good quality aftermkt grill? I won't try dealer, too expensive. Probably no good from junkyard.
 
#11 ·
Rockauto.com has one. Shipping can be kinda expensive though - Bulky item. A grill for your 2001 is only $12.11 + shipping. Look under "Body", then "Grille". I have no idea of the quality though.
 
#12 ·
#13 ·
That one on Amazon has great reviews, and with free shipping, that's a bargain! No way to know durability, but anything is gonna break if you whack it hard enough (obviously).
 
#15 ·
The part came today, shipped from MI to CA. It is wrapped in this huge cardboard. Inside it is placed in the white plastic bag with the white foam plastic paper as protection. It is made in Taiwan. The part itself looks good enough that I won't be able to tell it's aftermarket. If it really fits my car, I feel that I got my money's worth. Will see!
 

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#16 ·
I put it on today. And I would say the fit is about 85% correct. Most of the places match well. But the two bumps at the bottom of the grille won't go into the two slots on the bumper. To be fair, I am not sure my bumper is OEM. So it might not be the grille's fault.

Another issue is that the place where the log goes into the grille is a bit wider than OEM and there is too much chrome on top of the logo. I believe to everybody except me this aftermarket grille looks real.

I searched in junkyard before and it is VERY hard to find such a grille in good condition. So I shall just keep it. Hopefully this info will be useful to others.
 
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#17 ·
Feedback after 3 months. The conclusion is that this aftermarket grille is no where close to that of the OEM. The OEM one last 15+ years with only paint fade. Not a single rock chip. This aftermarket one has already accumulated a lot of rock chips in merely 3 months. The difference in quality is night and day.
 
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#18 ·
Nice write up, I liked how Toyota painted over the chrome. I wanted to make my grill a little different from every other Camry on the road, so I scraped the paint off the middle slots to expose the chrome. After about 18 years of being outside removing the paint was as easy as scratching a lottery ticket lol.

I wanted a little bit of chrome on the middle fins just to it subtle, At first I was contemplating if should keep middle chrome or middle w/ surround, but I went with the second option and glad I did.
 

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#19 ·
Huh. I knew they did this with the 2GS grille. I did not know the 4.5 Camry was like that.

Well, I went a different route. If was relatively expensive, especially for a car worth <3k.

I had it hydrodipped a similar pattern to the gallery edition trim. I also bought steel pillar covers and had then done, too.
 
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