Weight of steel plate

[eleblanc]

Aluminum has a protector plate is fine, but not for a "skid or rock slider" it will grab the roughness of the rock and you will stick on them and wear the plate really quickly.

1/8 or anywhere between 14 ga to 10 ga is fine for a protector. If you plane on jacking the truck on the skid plate, 3/16 is thin, IMHO 1/4 minimum and lots of bend, in other words no flat surface bigger then 14, 16"x16". When designing a skidplate thickness is irrelevant imo, it is the last thing you decide after you know how many bend and flat surface there is.

But since we do no have CNC and huge press to do our own mold and press steel, we use flat plate and at best we can do a couple of straight bend here and there.

If you only want to cover the underside of your truck against heavy gravel road use, then 3/16'' aluminum is the best. It is easy to drill and you will be able to crawl under the truck with the plate on your belly to get it installed.

 

[Spikepretorius]

Now if I could get all this info in Metric I'd be in heaven

 

[ntsqd]

snip.....
Aluminum has a protector plate is fine, but not for a "skid or rock slider" it will grab the roughness of the rock and you will stick on them and wear the plate really quickly.

That's a pretty common opinion to find on the net, but my experience is that it is not exclusively true. If you used 3003 (foolish move) then it would be, not so much with 6061 (which is what you'd get by default unless you asked for something different).

I would not use it under a door jam, but as an occasional use skid plate it works fine. None of the desert racers that I've worked on in the last 10 years used steel for skids nor can I recall ever seeing a steel skid on a desert racer, but two of the owners that I've crewed for also have hard core crawlers and appropriately wouldn't consider aluminum in that application.

The under engine skid on my air cooled VW powered glass bodied dune buggy was steel of ~.09" thick. Once a year had to take it off and beat it back flat, but it was fine being that thin. The buggy weighs about 2000 lbs. wet, and most of that weight on on the rear suspension so that skid took a lot of comparatively hard hits.

It is easy to decide to err too thick for the application, but just a little thought could prevent carrying around a bunch of dead weight.

Spike, Steel is .0078 grams per cubic millimeter and aluminum is .0027 grams per cubic millimeter.

 

[jeepmedic46]

I'm not using it to crawl over rocks, So Aluminum may be the way to go.