Skid Plate + Homemade?

Has anybody made their own skid plate? I have a nice piece of heavy gauge aluminum sheet which came off a auto carrier trailer. Have access to a body shop and tools. Thinking I might be able to make my own, but wondering about the experience of others. Came up empty on search of the site.

I have made my own using some 0.100" 2024 T3 Aluminum, not quite as thick as some of our vendors but I figure still better than the plastic oem one. Best thing to do is do a rough bending first to get the general shape, next one I make would be slightly longer than the oem one to accomadate the mounting hardware I used for mine. Have bent up 3 of them so far and no complaints as of yet.

Best thing as well is to have a hydraulic press if you can,makes bending it alot easier.

Thanks Doc! It is something I thought I could do. About how many bends, 2 or 3?

What about the front mounts? The plate won't take a huge shot without collapsing the front connection points. Just something to think about.

I have done it before! actually Its not to hard at all! the only thing is you need to make a few things and buy a few! BTW I have a stainless one I made up (extra ) for sale! It needs a few things but I can bring it to the gtg and you can take measurements and all that off of it!

let me know

kyle

I just made a skid plate myself. It was kinda a PITA cause it took 25 hrs or so to do. So if you really like to make stuff yourself then it makes sense to make it yourself. Next time I would probably buy one. And I love to make stuff

Send an email to TDIRacing (the RallyVW crew chief, not the web site name rip off artist). He has done his own and reworked the one on the rally car many times and could talk to you about what he has done for our cars as well as the support frame he uses for them.

P-car said:

I just made a skid plate myself. It was kinda a PITA cause it took 25 hrs or so to do. So if you really like to make stuff yourself then it makes sense to make it yourself. Next time I would probably buy one. And I love to make stuff

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wow that's a long time, I think if I recall I had 2 sheets of .125 bent them to rough shape on the press, trimmed them, debured, and then fine tuned the bends in about 1.5 or 2.5 hours. Longest part on mine was waiting on the paint shop guys at m old work to prime and paint the skid plate Will take some pictures later today any try to post them up.

Ok here are some picts

Alright finally got around to doing some pictures, this is no wingnut how to but hope it helps.

I first started with a raw piece of 36" x 36" and put my old skid plate next to it to determine where some of the bends will be, looks like I did a total of about 10 bends or so give or take.

So I started off with a square piece and did my rough bends and made it as close as I could, then layed my old skid plate on top and traced out the shape and took it to the band saw. Then took it to the belt sander and sanded it down to size as needed. One thing I would recomend is that if you decide to mount it like I did and I took two coupleing nuts and welded them to the frame, make your skid plate a little bit longer so that you can weld the nuts on the flat part of the frame, mine ended up being a bit short and so i made a couple plates to weld the nuts onto. Or probably the best way to do the rear to mounts is the riv nuts and bolts you can purchase from the dealer.

Here and a few pictures of the final product as i didn't tink do do a step by step photo of each till after it was all done.

Also in these pictures you can see I had it installed for a bit but my suspension is waay to soft and all the speed bumps hit, guess that's what ya get for lowing the car and with 209k kms on it the suspension seen better days.

As you can see the top two holes here is where I mentioned should be a little longer to accomadate a flat surface on the frame to weld the coupling nuts on.




This is taken from the lowest point of the skidplate as you can see just under 2"







I also fabricated 3 clips where the OEM one slides into the front valence for support. These are 1.5" x 3" with a joggle in the middle to slide where to OEM ones do.







It sits in there fine but after some thinking I will see about adding some supports like the DG and EVO skidplates have for more support, mind you I think that if there is an impact big enough to dent the 0.100" material I may have more to worry about than the skidplate but nothing wrong with being safe than sorry.





The first two I made with a friend and it took us about an hour and a half maybe two and a half to bend and cut the material. This being the third one took about the same amount of time plus the paint shop time to make it all nice and shiney blue. Plus maybe about a half hour or so of final tweaking at a fellow tdi club members place running back and forth from under the car and his press to make a perfect fit.

Hope this helps a bit.

looks good.

Agreed. Very cool.

someone should make a paper template of it before the bends and than mark where to bend on it and how much of a bend for each bend. that would be nice to pass around.

just a though...

if you have your old plastic skid plate it serves as a good template

if you have access to a plasma cutter you can cut it out in about 5 minutes or less.

Haven't priced out a 3x3 sheet of aluminum, but I did find some steel that is a half decent price. If I went with steel, what thickness do you think I should go with ??

wow!

That is really good work, Doc. I work in an aircraft hangar and we have a LOT of stock sheetmetal around. I'm going to start talking to th e guys in the sheetmetal sop and try to get some ideas. Someone mentioned a paper cut-out. I've used cardboard for that purpose before. Just remember that, the thicker the aluminum, the less it will bend before cracking. There is this whole math formula to determining max bend radii vs material thickness. Additionally, there is a seperate formula for determining setback when bending metal. I failed algebra like 3 times. I hate math. LOL

I wouldn't woorry to much about the cracking your barely bending the metal

cost effective?

So I had a long discussion about this with the sheetmetal guys at the hangar. I showed them Doc's photos as well as photos from the Atlas and panzer websites. It's agreed tha it is a pretty simple design and shouldn't be difficult to do. It was also agreed that 1/4" Stainless steel would be a better choice. It was also brought to my attention that the airline keeps a pretty tight accounting of all that stock metal and to buy y own. LOL Witht htat said heet metal, at least AK, isn't cheap. A sheet will cost over $100 plus all the riv nuts and etc. So you guys my want to look for a bargain on scrap metal. As for me, I think I'll just work one extra day at overtime wages and that shuold pay for my skidplate. What's your time worth-you know?

1/4" stainless? That's like 6mm...THICK! No wonder it's pricy. Half that thickness would suffice...

DPM said:

1/4" stainless? That's like 6mm...THICK! No wonder it's pricy. Half that thickness would suffice...

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True, but it wil also deflect a small caliber handgun bullet. LOL Actually, that was a typo. I meant 1/8". They said 1/4 would stainless wouldn't bend except in a hydraulic press.

I was gonna say - a SS plate 1/4" thick.??!! GOOD GAWD! That thing would also be a beotch to install... (unless you can bench press 300## all day long) I think 1/8" thick SS would be sweet - and more effective than plastic against road hazards..

NICE work..!

wow 1/4 stainless that would be very heavy and not worth it, even 1/8 aluminum would suffice and not to expensive, and it shouldn;t take long to make riv nuts are cheap....

Holy Crap!

A 4' x 4' piece of 1/8 stainless is $430! Suff that, the same piece in 5052 aluminum is $97. Probem solved.

i used 2024 t3 .125... free

doc_m said:

i used 2024 t3 .125... free

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Yeah but how hard is it?

I have been tempted to take the stock skid plate and do a nice 1/4" layer of fiberglass or balistics grade kevlar over it or something. Figure it should be a lot lighter than metal and fairly strong.

Any opinions?

david_594 said:

I have been tempted to take the stock skid plate and do a nice 1/4" layer of fiberglass or balistics grade kevlar over it or something. Figure it should be a lot lighter than metal and fairly strong.

Any opinions?

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Should work. Let me know if you try it. I might give it a go later this year or something, too many things going on at once.

great idea

david_594 said:

I have been tempted to take the stock skid plate and do a nice 1/4" layer of fiberglass or balistics grade kevlar over it or something. Figure it should be a lot lighter than metal and fairly strong.

Any opinions?

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That is an absoluely incredible idea and I'm ticked off that i didn't think of it first! We use a fiberglass composite on our turbo prop airplne fuselages as an iceshield directly adjacent to where the prop blades spin. The blades are heated electrically and the force of the blades throws the ice against the fuselage. (You shold see the passengers in those seats frak out when it happnes.) They work great but the paint doesn't hold on too long and the composite cracks over time. Still, it's easy to repair.

If you do try that, I might strongly suggest two things. A.) Don't use standard marine fiberglass resin. Marine structural coth might be ok (2 layers thick) but use a two part epoxy resin. B.) You have t make absolutely certain that al of your layers bond 100%. If you don't, water and condensation will collect in the pockets and cause weak points. Totally saturate cloths with epoxy before you apply them to your OEM plastic skid plate. Prior to that even, sand the poop out of the skid plate where you plan to bond the new coomposite. Mke sure yo let the epoxy set for at least 24 hrs at about 70 degrees.

FL2AK-tdi said:

Yeah but how hard is it?

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alot more than the plastic skid plate and will put up to more abuse than it, if there is a hit hard enough to dent that I wouldn't be just worried about the skid plate.

FL2AK-tdi said:

If you do try that, I might strongly suggest two things. A.) Don't use standard marine fiberglass resin. Marine structural coth might be ok (2 layers thick) but use a two part epoxy resin. B.) You have t make absolutely certain that al of your layers bond 100%. If you don't, water and condensation will collect in the pockets and cause weak points. Totally saturate cloths with epoxy before you apply them to your OEM plastic skid plate. Prior to that even, sand the poop out of the skid plate where you plan to bond the new coomposite. Mke sure yo let the epoxy set for at least 24 hrs at about 70 degrees.

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Honestly, I have marine resin on hand. I also have a crap ton of fiberglass mat and about a yard of fiberglass cloth. My plan was going to be a bunch of layers of mat and then do the cloth on the top layer. I am going to have to look for this 2 part resin you mention though. Thanks.