Quote:
Originally Posted by theiceman
umm if that's all you have there .. you are missing some bits.. its very thin aluminum and its not a reinforcement plate , and although i will agree it helps keep things square it doesnt prevent anything from collapsing . my car was a track car and ran without it for years.. its just a bracket . P/N 986 331 161 03 if you want to look it up .. or you can google skid plate to find it
that is a massive cross member holding it towards the front of the car in the pic and there is more bracing taken off that car .. and there is a bunch of triangular braces not on that pic you showed ..
But i will leave you to it if you think your " reinforcement plate" is at peril and your alignment is off because you are missing a bolt , better park your car..
I will leave you with these parting words from Pedro's garage . Guy has forgotten more about Boxters than most people will ever know ..
... with Marc regarding the aluminum plate.
It doesn't really do anything to "keep things where they ought to be".
That's why AX cars need the TechnoBrace or similar. The aluminum plate deforms and bends.
The keeping things where they ought to be is done by the diagonal braces.
The aluminum plate is just there for protection and for channeling air to the tranny.
If you moved the eccentric, your alignment is off.
It is practically impossible to dial it back to where it was.
Happy Boxstering,
Pedro
oh and dont get me wrong. id be pissed if guy didnt put bolts back , i wonder if it was even there to start with . When i put mine back on it was a pain in the ass to line everything up , and this is a common complaint.. guy should have done the job right .. if i got mine on on axle stands and im a home mechanic, god knows he should have.
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Nothing structural is really missing from the picture but the two diagonal brackets, but those are connected to the two bolts toward the front of the car. The two other ones (toward the back) are connected to the reinforcement plate. Which means, if the plate is not there, the back side of this double rectangular shape is still open on one side (on the back). The whole thing is bit like a cardboard structure: lightweight pieces are used but in a geometrically engineered way to give rise to the maximum strengths against rotating forces from any direction. If one side of the cardboard box is opened, it loses a lot of its rigidity. If you look at a picture of the assembled rear suspension you see what I'm talking about. The reinforcement plate itself does not have to be thick steel; supported by six bolts even a relatively thin aluminum plate can withstand really high forces. So, I don't know who Mark is, but I disagree with him on this
But, if you used your car even on the track and did not see any issues with it then probably this whole engineering from the Germans was an overkill.
And yes, this is not really what my post was about, it's more like why would you do half of a job because you are lazy and charge the owner for the full price. Pretty sure they didn't give the owner the missing bolt in a bag saying, sorry, we couldn't put this back in.
Based on the records (again, only 22k miles) this must have been the first time they took the plate off for a transmission oil change, and I don't see a reason why it would have been missing on a car that was assembled in the factory. And they couldn't put it back on because the holes were not lined up.