Skidplate Installed

Do you remember the skidplate I was making? I’ve finished it up and installed it on the car.

To do that, I needed to add some mounting brackets. That involved a second vacuum bagging step to add flanges and stiffeners on the top side. But even that wasn’t sufficient because you don’t want to put bolts straight into kevlar. It’s not very good at handling point loads. So I also needed to add some metal plates to spread the load out. I bonded those to the kevlar using Plexus MA300 glue. The result looks like this:

The front bolts to two holes that were already in the chassis. I didn’t want to drill any more holes in the side rails, so I designed these clamps and printed them using Formlabs High Temp resin.

They’ve got a couple of bolts that go horizontally into the metal plates, and a vertical adjusting bolt. That one has a little rubber cap and presses down against the frame rail.

It’s kind of tricky to get pictures of the installation because the engine bay is so crowded. In fact it was pretty hard to tighten all of the bolts because the engine bay is so crowded. You can see the front bracket pretty well.

But the ones on the side are both tucked up under other pieces.

Here’s a view from the bottom.

https://flic.kr/p/XdF4GK

As you can see, it fits pretty well. Hopefully it is strong enough to keep the oil pan from taking any direct impacts.