Rear skid plate

[Akjoe]

The snow is gone and I’m ready for another great season of top-down driving! I tackled a couple of projects this past weekend: A spark plug tube replacement to address an oil leak and subsequent terrible smell, and install of a cat-back exhaust system. Tubes were drama free thanks to a ton of great tips and info from this board. I installed circuit werkes secondary cat-bypass pipes and the FVD Brombacher Sound Version muffler. It’s a sweet sounding setup! It’s quiet enough that I don’t bug the neighbors leaving before sunrise in the morning, but comes alive over 4K RPM. I love it!

The only headache I ran into was re-installing the rear aluminum skid plate. It was a challenge to get it off, and 90 mins of swearing, banging, pleading, praying, to get it back in. I’m pretty sure one of the mount bolts wound up cross-threaded, but I cranked it down anyway as I was just out of patience.

Did I do something wrong? Is the plate integral to the suspension in some way? Did something move after I removed it? I frankly never want to take that off again...but if I have to, is there something I should tie down or together before removal? It seems like the studs and bolt holes were not where they were when I started. (Perhaps even more insulting is that I’m pretty sure I could have threaded the bypass pipes in and done the exhaust install without removing the plate.)