2011 Chevrolet Equinox LTZ Lower Grille DIY Solutions GRI00405

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2015 Chevy Equinox. We're going to be doing a front grille--comes right out of the front bumper cover assembly. It can be fairly easy. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts, you can always check us out 1AAuto.com.

Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to try to get this little plastic plate off of here. There's some push clips. I'm going to go ahead and remove these. The center of these pulls up from the outer part of it. I'll show you what it looks like here. That's what they look like. So when you have the center pushed in, it forces those two sides out, which holds it in the hole. Okay? So that's why you lift up the center part. It relieves pressure, and this thing can squish. This slides right out of the hole. Okay. So we're going to do the same thing for all of these. Just a little spot you can try, and get your tool into. I'm using my little forky tool. You can use whatever you've got. A pocket screwdriver usually works pretty well.

Just set these aside. Sometimes they come apart and that's okay. We'll just shove it back together. Easy peasy. Okay. So we've got those four out. Let's see if I can grab this plastic. Wiggle it around and see what's holding it in. And now that we've got this side off, we're going to do the same to the other side of the vehicle. And then we'll go ahead and we'll start removing the rest of the bumper cover. There we go. That one out of the way.

So now we're going to remove these. These are torx bits, little T20s, like little stars. This is what the tool looks like. Put it in here. Turn it to the left. Zip them all out. I'm going to leave one in. I'm just going to have it loose though. That's just going to make it so the bumper cover stays on while we continue down on the bottom there, and it'll hold it up for us. That's what those look like. They're all the same. You get the one that's still there, of course. This can move around a little bit. Perfect. Let's move along.

So we're going to do some a push clips here. We've got a push clip right there. Okay. There's going to be another one right in front of this tire right there, here, and here. After we remove those, there's a T20 and a T20 there. Same tool that we used up top we're going to use down bottom. Okay. So I got my little forky tool. I got a little screwdriver. Just going to see about trying to pull out the centers of these push clips. I showed you how they worked already. Show you again, just in case.

When it was closed, it was like that. I just go in between, pull out the center and then it unlocks the little edges there. So here we go. We got that one. Then move down the line. Grab this guy. All right. This one's going to be a little harder to get to because the tire. But I'm sure it can be done. Got our push clips. Set it aside. Got our T20 here and here. They both look the same. Easy peasy. Can't mix them up. That feels pretty great. Take a peek under here. We've got that bolt right there. I'm going to grab the size for that real quick. I'll let you know what it is. Once we get that out, we're going to do the same exact thing for the other side of the vehicle. And then we'll lift it up more and we'll grab everything from underneath.

All right, so we got our seven millimeter. Going to blast this out of here. There it is. Set that side. Okay. Going to give that a little tug. Perfect. So now like I said, we're going to go do the same exact thing on the other side of the vehicle. We'll raise it up, we'll continue on releasing the rest of this bumper cover. Disconnect the fog lights, of course. Then we should be clear to bring it back down and pop it all right off.

So under here we've got our fog light assemblies. You can see them from the backside. We've got some wiring that goes to the bulb. We're just going to turn the bulb to the left, counterclockwise, until it stops, and then we're going to carefully pull it out, like so. Give it a quick inspection. We've got our rubber seal there. Slide it back over--easy enough. Easy enough without the flashlight in my hand. There it is. Cool.

All right, so something to note. You want to be very careful not to touch on that glass, especially if you've got oily hands or anything like that. Even gloves isn't really the best to touch the glass. So if you can avoid it, that's always great.

Take a look and see if it looks like it's black in any way, or discolored, or swollen, or the filament inside looks like it's got any like crusty buildups on it. If that was the case, you'd want to replace it, and right on the back of the bulb, you can see what the bulb number is. It's an H11 on this particular vehicle. So I'm sure it is when yours as well, if you're working on the same thing. I'm just going to leave this down to dangle, funny word, but anyway We're going to leave it so it can hang like that. And I'm going to do the same to the other side and then we'll just go ahead and we'll remove a couple more bolts here. Get the lower part of this thing moving and then we'll go head back up top. We'll take off the last bolt and we should be able to slide this right off.

So here we go. This part right here is part of the inner wheel well that we were taking a part up there. So we want to remove these two bolts. We're going to continue with our seven millimeter. Turn these to the left, obviously. Move right along. This little electric tool is amazing. Slides out. Clear to come off. Got a little triangle here. Okay. So when you pull it off, you can see that just means when you're putting it back together--that triangle's going to go back into there. Okay. Just holds it. You can put your bolts back in. Easy peasy. Okay, cool. So this is wobbling around pretty easily now. I would say we're clear to bring it back down and we'll start pulling it off.

Here we go. Time for our last bolt up top here. Going to hold our bumper cover. Make sure it doesn't want to come loose too much on us, until we can figure out exactly what's going on. Now don't forget we have our fog lamp bulbs just hanging under there. Okay. So the less that we juggle this around, probably the better--overall. So, let's see if I can get this off. There we are. Now we've removed our front bumper cover. So the way that I want to start, is I'm actually just going to try to pry this away a little bit, and try to stick my little forky tool under here. If I can get it. Just going to try to work it. There we are. We want to try to save these. Okay? Because our new one, you're going to need these to lock it in.

So there's one going to be one located on the other side over here. So I'm going to do the same thing. Stick my little screwdriver in there. Just try to pry it away enough. Get my little forkey tool in there. I'm just going to work it. There's number two. Put those both together. All my tools together. Now, along the grille and the bumper, the grille has like these little tabs that we're going to need to push. So you just pry the bumper away from the grille, and push out the grille as you go. Okay. There we are. And we'll just do that down the line. Being very careful not to shove it through and poke ourselves, of course. Safety first. Okay. We're cruising--looking good.

That one already feels like it's out. That's nice. This one's out. Even cooler. Come over here. There we go. Very nice. Okay. Okay. So I want to try to take this off right here. It's just a square bit, but you can use something like a pocket screwdriver, or whatever you have that will remove it. Just screws right in. It's easy peasy. Okay. Right along here, just these little hooks. Just going to see if I can wiggle a little bit. All I want to do is get this hook to go through there, and then carefully lift. There we are. And then if you want to, you could do this side too, but we can see pretty good at this point I think.

So now we'll just analyze our situation. Right along here, this black clip, this black clip, this one, this one, this one, and this one are part of crate or grille, crate. Bobo. Everything's easier off camera, I got to tell you. So, anyway, just going to try to push it. Okay. All I'm doing is trying to pry the bumper down away from those black things. Looks like we got one more. There we are. Okay. Just set this up so I can grab that. Let it fall. Cool. Now we've removed our plastic grille. We'll go ahead and replace this for you.

We have our grill from our 2015 Chevy Equinox. We just removed it. It was fairly simple. And we have our brand new quality 1A Auto part right here. This came shipped direct. As you can tell, it's in perfect condition. It's the exact same as the original quality, right? Much shinier. We'll spin them around. We'll show you it looks the exact same. There's nothing different about it. So if you need this part for any other part, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com.

Okay, so here we go. We've got our brand new quality grille here. We're going to be very careful. We've got our little nubs here. Remember we had those little clips on them, right? Those go inside the holes, inside the bumper, so we're going to be careful and line those up. Once they're lined up, everything else should line up pretty easily. Let's try to squeeze it in. Go right down the line here. Hold from the backside. Just give everything a little push. Get it working. There's clips going all the way around. So see if we can get them to all line up.

If they seem like they keep popping back out. Well, it's probably just because the bottom might not be in yet and so it just doesn't have enough tension yet. See what's going on with this one. Come around, try looking from this side. Okay. Get it clipped. So we've got our little clips here, these little locking clips we took off the backside of the grille. As you could tell, there's raised edges there, right? Backside is nice and smooth. I'm just going to put her on a flat block very carefully flatten them out. Okay. So they're pretty flat. Now I'm going to take it and I'm going to put it over the little stud areas I guess you'd say.

I'm going to force it on and that's going to force those prongs back out a little bit, but they should be nice and tight up against those prongs. So here we go. So now I've got this pretty much flattened out. Right. So I'm at the starting position. Just going to start it on there. I'm holding the back side, right? So I don't push it through. All I'm going to do is take my socket, just going to try to push it on there. There we are. Nice and locked. There we go. Cool. Now that we got this locked in, won't go anywhere. We'll do the same to the other side and we'll move along.

Okay, so we've got both of our clips in. We're going to move along. We're going to get this situated, right? Got a little plastic screw or a handy dandy tool that we use to remove it. Got our hole here. It's going to go right over this. The other side's still in. We didn't remove it earlier, so that's nice. I'm just going to take it, kind of push it in. Okay. Just like everything else, likes to play the game. Let's see what I'm doing wrong here. There it is. I felt like it did something a little different. Cool. Okay.

You can use the square bit there, or you can just use your small screwdriver if you have one that's the right size. And this is just screwing into styrofoam so you don't need very much torque. Let that be said. Okay. Once it's snug, all that does is holds the little plastic right there from moving. Feels pretty great. Let's get this puppy mounted. So here we go. We've got our bumper cover. We're going to lift it up on here. We're going to be careful of these edges, to make sure that they don't go hitting up against the fender, you know, I mean, and this one's a little damaged, but that wasn't me, by the way, just playing. It really wasn't though.

Anyway, I'm just going to keep those edges low and I'm just going to scoop the top end up here. Just get it kind of settled in. I'm going to start a couple of these bolts, just to hold it for me. And then I'm going to work my way along the edges there. Get everything settled in along the top, and then I'll go down to the bottom and do the same thing. So what size is this? 20. Torx bit 20. Keep it loose just in case we have to move some stuff around. Right?

Just want to make sure that it can't fall down, hit the floor. Like I said, I'm keeping all these loose. I'm just starting them in, so I can move everything around as I need to. Okay. Nice and loose. Okay, let's come along here. Right up along the headlamp, we had the little scoops, right? You come over here, and got a little clip, clip, clip, clip, clip. Okay. So that's where your bumper's going to want to ride in. So you're going to need to bring it up, bring it right up along your headlamp.

The bumper cover itself has all these little slots in it, right? That's where those clips are going to want to ride. So you're probably going to need to give it a little tug just to get it into where it needs to go. All right. Looking good. We'll do the same thing to the other side. All right, so we've got the bumper all lined up. It looks great. Couldn't ask for better. Really. I'm just going to take my torx bit 20, snug these puppies up. Very nice. All right.

Now let's lift it up to our working height so we can get to those wheel wells. We'll get all those put together. Then we'll bring it all the way up. We'll plug in our fog lights and finish up along the bottom. All right. So we remember that we had the one seven millimeter head bolt. It goes right up through here, right? It goes through the bottom of the bumper cover up into the fender. So just my little tool, you can use a ratchet, whatever you got. We're just going to put it in the hole here.

There it is. Nice and snug. Okay, going to grab this and slide it back into position here. Okay, so now when we look at it, you can see behind there. There's a metal piece. That's where there's a screw. This one's just a big gaping hole. That's a plug screw. Hole. All right, so let's see what we got for parts. We got two screws. Perfect. I remember saying we needed two screws, and we got four little push clips, so we didn't lose anything. We're doing all right.

There we are. Let's do the push clips first cause they'll kind of keep everything kind of generally speaking where it should be, right. And then we can worry about putting in all those screws after. There we go. So two screws. I'm just going to grab my little torx bit, sticking with my 20, okay. Turn the wheel, or not. See if I can get this in. Going to grab a ratchet. I'll finish that one off in one second.

There we are. Grab my ratchet. Feels great. Okay, all those are still in. Perfect. We'll do the same to the other wheel well, and then we'll bring it up and continue. So now we're going to put it in our fog lamps. Once again, we're going to be very careful not to touch that glass. Okay. We'll just check them one more time to make sure the filament's not broken. We did a lot of moving around. I'm just going to take it and put it up in here. Going to start by going all the way as far counter-clockwise as I can, and then I'm going to turn it to the right, so it locks in. Should be straight up and down in the locked in position. Okay.

So I'll come over and do the same thing over here. Check it. Looks pretty great. Filament's not broken. Nothing moving around. I didn't touch the glass. Going to bring it over. Going to turn it all the way counterclockwise as far as I can until it grabs. Then I'm going to bring it back to the right. Once it sets in, bring it down. It's locked. It's in the straight up and down position. All ears are in. Cool. So now we're going to grab this. We got our little triangle ear here. It's going to slide over that, just like this. So that's in.

We're going to do the same thing to the other side. We've got two bolts. Okay. Easy peasy. All right, so I've got my bolts, just going to take them and put them in. There we are. This one. Over here. This one. Very nice. Everything feels great. We'll bring it back down. We'll finish up with the top and we should be all done. Okay. So now it's time to put these up along the top right. Got our little clips here, right? Like I said, if you looked at this, and you didn't see the metal clip, it's probably inside these holes right here. If that was the case, you'd want to just take them out. Okay. Can use something like a pocket screwdriver or whatever you have to do, get them out of there. Put them back on this. Okay.

You can't just go ahead and put this plastic into those metal clips if they're down there. They just don't like to work that way. So anyway, we're going to line up these with these holes. Being careful not to scratch any of our paint. Just like always. We're trying real hard to do a good job here. Slides under there. This up here. Got our holes lined up. Let's give a little bonk, bonk, bonk. Slid in there. Okay. We've got four push clips. One here, one there, here, and there. Okay. You can do them in any order. You do you booboo. Slide them in, and then push in the center. Okay. Slide it in, push in the center.

One to the last. Slide it in. Push in the center. This under here should go right in there. Very nice. Okay. I'll get this puppy lined up. There's just a little hole in it right there, that slides over this. Okay. It's just kind of like a rain drip guard type of deal. There we are. Looks pretty great. We'll do the same to the other side, and then we're all set.

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