Hi Murray, I'm in Perth and have an 81 308 gtsi. Was wondering if it's possible to buy the skid plate etc from you? Cheers Ken
Murray/Gleggy is one of the seller's buds. The maker of these parts is Gerry Duyvestyn and can be reached at [email protected] - great guy, super easy to work with. Hope this helps! Rick edit: I should have added Murray was very helpful in helping me make contact with Gerry as his previously posted emails were no longer working. thanks Murray!
Last year, I bottomed the car at speed on a very rough road (Highland Road in Livermore CA, if you must know) and I did not like the experience very much. To protect the car, I recently purchased a front skid plate from Superformance. I am trying to decide on mounting methods. In crawling under the car to see where it mounts and in reviewing this thread, I am wondering now if anyone has feedback regarding the robustness of mounting with the 5 mm bolts. Are they sufficiently robust to hold the plate? My concern is that scraping forces on the skid plate will put considerable shear force on the four corner bolts which could cause them to snap. Likewise, if there is any twisting force on the plate, drilling and taping into the frame rail metal doesn't provide a whole bunch of tensile strength. It looks to me that the three bolts across the middle are pretty much useless since they just screw into a thin square piece of tubing that is there for the battery mount. I am curious about peoples experience with the performance of the skid plate mount when the skid plate has received an impact.
Whatever robust skid plate deflects The oil pan receives. Kind of a lose /lose situation. That’s my thought on the subject anyway.
The 599GTB hat toured South and North America had a 1/4" aluminum plate, to armor the entire underside of the car! Are the bolt heads countersunk? That would be my only question. On a partial pan, as you have .....you are not so much armoring the car, as you are deflecting smaller objects that might pierce the original panels and damage components. Post photos of your project, I'm very interested, as I have ,made replacement panels for the front section under the battery, and when they get damaged I make another one! As far as the bolt sizes, a lot of the front frame of our cars are smaller sections, not the main oval tube. So I would not go crazy making the bolts any larger, it's a weak point in the member at that point. If you hit something big enough to shear them all off, that 's not driving, that's an accident!! Teasing, as I often mention if you fit 16" wheels to 14" wheel car, you are going to pound the hell out of the undertray if you don't drive with heightened awareness of your ground clearance.
..you can barely see what I can only guess was a custom fabricated part. That front nerf bar goes thru the spoiler thru round hole the size of the tube, yet the rectangular plates that go to the frame are far larger, It could only have been assembled THRU the spoiler panel, then welded together and bolted up. Handy, like a pocket on a shirt! It has deflected the 5 gallon plastic bucket off the freeway, on occasion. Image Unavailable, Please Login
Obviously there's not much material in our front spoilers to fasten to. I'm going to throw out a method used on fibreglass boats..for any thru bolting requiring strength, a backing plate inside the hull, thru bolted with hex nylocks, backs up the shell material for a more substantial support. This is a dangerous game of course as the blow out would now be the size of the plate! But in the case of our spoiler, I would be thinking of a crescent or bar, spanning all the way across, and receiving the thru bolts at the leading edge, not just "the front corners"....That leading edge is "where the action is"!! Post a picture, you have drawn me in with all of this...my "added plate" is simply a aluminum piece with a slight angle break in it, and it starts behind the battery and bridges to the main large plate that covers our entire floor....
The air scoop shown in Post #42 IS an originall Factory part...all my 1976 and 1977s came with one....air deflector
I bought a skid plate from Forza for my 328, no instructions or technical help from them either. My mechanic said to fit it steel strengthening to the chassis would have to be done to fix it to. I didn’t bother, now it’s on a shelf in my garage if anyone wants to make an offer I’ll sell it on, I’m in the UK. Sent from my iPhone using FerrariChat.com mobile app
Laying under the car and looking at the frame and point of impact when I bottomed out the car, I believe that adding a skid plate has a lot of merit. When a car bottoms, it is not hitting glass-smooth roadway. It instead is hitting uneven concrete where one point under the car takes the brunt of the impact. Since the fiberglass undertray is more flexible, it is the frame rails that take the hit. If the car had a skid plate, the skid plate would be the sacrificial metal during that moment of hard abrasion and would distribute the force across the width of the frame rail. The side mounting points of the skid plate are directly under the suspension A-arms. This is a very robust part of the frame structure. The problem is that there is not much room to affix the skid plate to those frame rails. The installation procedure outlined in this thread describes drilling and tapping the frame rails for four M5 countersunk Allen head bolts; two on each side of the skid plate. Since my post earlier today, I found another post by "Ferraridoc" who sheared the M5 bolts on his skid plate. His documentation is here: Bolts Sheared on Skid Plate I am wondering now if it might be best to use larger diameter bolts (M8?) with the countersunk Allen heads and, like BigTex suggests, backing with Nyloc nuts rather than threading the frame rails. The problems is that there may not be enough room for the nuts. Also as BigTex (and Ferraridoc) warns, this could cause bigger damage if, for example, the skid plate hooks on something causing a major levered force on the frame rail. I have the smaller front spoiler which seems to be sloped sufficiently that the first point of impact is the frame rail area. I can't deny that I do have paint scraped off of the fiberglass through.
See pics below. There was no firm level or robust area to bolt the skid plate to without fabrication. Skid plate for sale any reasonable offer accepted plus post. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
