I went and got some lower control arm skids put on at Total Chaos on Saturday. The front LCA's (along with the stock UCA and tie rods) are the only things I've broken on my truck so far (broken to point of not working, anyway). So I've been looking to protect and beef these up for quite a long time.
The Total Chaos plates are listed at the top of the web page linked to this text.
The skids are bolt-on, but could also be welded. An early version of the skids had big bolt heads that looked like a sure thing to damage. These have now been changed out for low profile dome head bolts. I'm testing the bolting, but will probably weld these suckers on eventually.
We had two issues during installation that are going to get folded into retail versions of the skids:
1. The nut on the wheel-ward side of the plate would interfere with the CV boot on full droop --- this has been solved by using a 1/2 size nylock and precisely cut bolt lengths.
2. The second is only for those people running jounces or chubbies ("running with a chubbie" doesn't mean what it sounds like, btw) - the plate would interfere with the mounting bolt on the receiver dome. Total Chaos are now looking into putting an access port into the plate for the jounce mount bolt. (The solution that MAF came up with for this woefully exposed bolt is to cut an access port into the bottom of the LCA and recess the bolt inside of the LCA -- I would have torn that bolt off on my first trip out).
Anyway, here are the plates mounted on my truck. I'm going to take the truck out to Death / Panamint Valley(s) over 26-29 Dec period and will try to beat the cr*p out of them. I'll post up how well they behave:
The Total Chaos plates are listed at the top of the web page linked to this text.
The skids are bolt-on, but could also be welded. An early version of the skids had big bolt heads that looked like a sure thing to damage. These have now been changed out for low profile dome head bolts. I'm testing the bolting, but will probably weld these suckers on eventually.
We had two issues during installation that are going to get folded into retail versions of the skids:
1. The nut on the wheel-ward side of the plate would interfere with the CV boot on full droop --- this has been solved by using a 1/2 size nylock and precisely cut bolt lengths.
2. The second is only for those people running jounces or chubbies ("running with a chubbie" doesn't mean what it sounds like, btw) - the plate would interfere with the mounting bolt on the receiver dome. Total Chaos are now looking into putting an access port into the plate for the jounce mount bolt. (The solution that MAF came up with for this woefully exposed bolt is to cut an access port into the bottom of the LCA and recess the bolt inside of the LCA -- I would have torn that bolt off on my first trip out).
Anyway, here are the plates mounted on my truck. I'm going to take the truck out to Death / Panamint Valley(s) over 26-29 Dec period and will try to beat the cr*p out of them. I'll post up how well they behave: