Jetboy
New member
Thought I'd share a few quick pics of a project I did two weeks ago. It's been heavily tested since then... I'll get a trip report put together at some point. Still haven't unpacked yet. But the trip was rough enough to destroy a TRD Pro aluminum skid. They're just not strong enough for rock crawling unfortunately. Actually the steel OEM steel front skid is quite a bit better in terms of durability than the TRD Pro aluminum one.
A few build pics. My general philosophy is; less metal - more structure - lighter weight.
What would make this skid better would have been to rip 2" tube the long way and have rounded runners rather than using channel. But I was running out of time. In a perfect world I'd have an extra day to work on it and would have done it via a CNC cut single piece, but my day job got in the way and the trip was coming up fast so I just did it the old fashioned way - by tracing the tank with a sharpie and cutting the plate by hand with a plasma. The outer rim is 2" flat bar. It's easy to just start stitching it and bend as you go. The mounting brackets were actually pretty easy to fab. Again - would look prettier and probably be a bit lighter with formed plate, but I just didn't have time to design them.
The CNC design takes time I didn't have. I built the entire skid in about 5 hours, from driving in to driving out painted. I'd need at least a full day probably to do a CNC version. But then it'd be replicatable in maybe 1-2 hours for each additional one.
In a perfect world I'd have a stamp or roller to form thicker plate to be identical to the OEM skid, only with double the metal thickness. The oem design is better than anything any of us can actually build at home. It's just too thin for prime time. I tried by simply adding a plate to it. It survived the Rubicon last year, but it was pretty beat up.
So here's a few pics of how I did it. I use 1/4" flat spacers to add a small spacer for deflection during fitment. You don't want it actually touching the tank anywhere. Doing it this way fits very tightly, but not too close. Probably went on and off 15 times to get the mounting right. In a production shop You'd just buy a factory new skid and build a jig off of it. But my OEM skid was too far gone to really use as a template.
One other thought would be to use an OEM skid and add structure to it on the inside - 2mm of carbon fiber fabric and epoxy on the inside would probably make it stronger and lighter than any skid that exists otherwise. And it wouldn't be all that hard to do. If I had had a brand new OEM skid I might have tried that. And then add 2mm spacers to the mounting points.
Finally - it's a plastic tank. Please don't try to weld around it if you copy this design. Don't hurt yourself.
A few build pics. My general philosophy is; less metal - more structure - lighter weight.
What would make this skid better would have been to rip 2" tube the long way and have rounded runners rather than using channel. But I was running out of time. In a perfect world I'd have an extra day to work on it and would have done it via a CNC cut single piece, but my day job got in the way and the trip was coming up fast so I just did it the old fashioned way - by tracing the tank with a sharpie and cutting the plate by hand with a plasma. The outer rim is 2" flat bar. It's easy to just start stitching it and bend as you go. The mounting brackets were actually pretty easy to fab. Again - would look prettier and probably be a bit lighter with formed plate, but I just didn't have time to design them.
The CNC design takes time I didn't have. I built the entire skid in about 5 hours, from driving in to driving out painted. I'd need at least a full day probably to do a CNC version. But then it'd be replicatable in maybe 1-2 hours for each additional one.
In a perfect world I'd have a stamp or roller to form thicker plate to be identical to the OEM skid, only with double the metal thickness. The oem design is better than anything any of us can actually build at home. It's just too thin for prime time. I tried by simply adding a plate to it. It survived the Rubicon last year, but it was pretty beat up.
So here's a few pics of how I did it. I use 1/4" flat spacers to add a small spacer for deflection during fitment. You don't want it actually touching the tank anywhere. Doing it this way fits very tightly, but not too close. Probably went on and off 15 times to get the mounting right. In a production shop You'd just buy a factory new skid and build a jig off of it. But my OEM skid was too far gone to really use as a template.
One other thought would be to use an OEM skid and add structure to it on the inside - 2mm of carbon fiber fabric and epoxy on the inside would probably make it stronger and lighter than any skid that exists otherwise. And it wouldn't be all that hard to do. If I had had a brand new OEM skid I might have tried that. And then add 2mm spacers to the mounting points.
Finally - it's a plastic tank. Please don't try to weld around it if you copy this design. Don't hurt yourself.
