Skid Plate - Necessary?

Necessary and handy if you run over something as better to damage your skid plate than your suspension.

 

or get one of them loose road gators sucked up into the belts and fan area, saw it happen on the freeway once, it came out of nowhere trucker started shredding a tire

 

Like most things it is personal no real right or wrong

 

Yep, I agree.!

 

MPGs will suffer without one

 

Howdy, when I went to chanage my timing belt and water pump, both the balancer and more importantly, the timming belt cog on the crank, came off easily with no puller needed. Helped a great deal putting the new belt on . I attribute that to always haveing the splash pan on. Truck had over 200,000 miles. For regular road use, I would never leave that splash pan off it protects the front of the engine from a lot of potential damage, mostly saltly road spray.

 

The Toyota engineers decided to use a splash pan to protect the engine, and every Tacoma produced has them installed. Who are you (or anyone else, for that matter) to dispute their findings?

 

i hit two birds on the highway today flying out of the ditches & no avoiding them, not sure where the bones went maybe underneath the front
that would suck to get a bird caught up inside a fast moving engine & fan blade
chop chop chop oops bone made belt slip off oh no here we go again