Bashed crossmember on a rock. What should I do?

I have always known what the OEM plates are, although I will say that they do a far better job of protecting the limited area that they cover than I expected them to. If I had the TRD Pro plate it probably would have been destroyed while the OEM pie tins look like shit but I can bend them back into shape and mount them back up and they definitely provided needed protection. Of course the fact that they don't even cover the oil pan really limits their usefulness.

 

You have not addressed the speed you were traveling. I scraped my steel RCI engine and transmission skids across some large pre-cambrian river rock on a trail and the engine plate took a serious gouge. They also have taken some hard slams on a trail I will never run again because it is so unpleasant. But I was driving more slowly on those trail sections so there was less downforce and that helped the plates protect.

Better skid plates will help, but you need to check if the crossmember has been bent too much to reattach then without at least longer bolts.

Good luck with this.

 

A body shop with a frame machine can fix this. I would get this checked , my guess is it may be tweaked slightly. Any time you play , there are always risks unfortunately. Check it out when able to and get better protection so it doesn’t happen again

 

Oof. Which road in DVNP?

 

Going in South Pass to Saline Valley.

 

Yep. I believe most of the vertical portion is the AM/FM antenna so if I move that to a real antenna I can get better reception and leave everything else flat with a 3D printed cover. Of course it is way down on my priorities list at this point so we will see if I actually get around to it. Honestly not sure I really need any of it there so could go with a simpler solution as well.

 

Wow. That's wild. It was basically a graded fire road when I drove it in February.

 

It was generally much rougher than it was when I went in the fall but the damage was from one spot coming down the north side from south pass where you are going downhill and the road surface is all rocks/gravel. It looked to me like someone had locked up their brakes going down which pushed the gravel into piles then dug big holes spinning their wheels to get over their mess. Because of the lay of the road really couldnt see it until I was right on it and hard braking would have just dug my nose into the pile. So when I hit the rough spot the truck bounced hitting my undercarriage on the road 3 times. Must have been some big rocks in there. I was only going 15mph at the time which is not crazy for that road.

 

Send it!

 

That OEM pie tin looks about right after taking it off-road. I did the same to mine - just stopped at the foot of a very rocky and steep part of a trail that I couldn’t get enough traction on to climb it normally in 4wd, so I turned on crawl control for the first time. My truck started climbing but bouncing like a bucking bronco on top of a rock and bent the pie tin all by itself! I ended up getting a full set of steel plates after that. It’s my daily driver, but I also use it a lot for off-roading on mine trails and other unimproved roads in the desert.