Kilby Steering Box Skid Plate with hardware |
It almost
seems like everyone these days makes a steering box skid plate.
I did a search using a popular search engine and got more the
100 hits by at least 20 different manufacturers. For the most
part, each one of them would do their jobs ok - protect
the leading edge of the steering gear box from getting hit
by rocks, stumps or branches while driving, giving the
driver one less thing to worry about.
To be honest,
I was already running a Tomken Steering Box plate when my
Editor passed this new Kilby Steering Box Skid Plate on
to me and said to give it a test. Okay, I said, as I figured
this would be a pretty simple task.
The Kilby
Steering Box Skid Plate is basically the same design
as many of the other ones on the market but as I found
out it may have actually had a lot more thought put into
it than the others when it came time to bend metal and put
something new on the market. That is to say that while two
designs may appear similar and perform the same job, in
reality, one may do it much simpler, with better thought
and function.
The first
problem I ran into was getting the Tomken plate off. Tomken
used a nut placed inside the factory frame hole to secure
a bolt that came up from the bottom of the plate into the
frame. This sounded like a great idea at the time and worked
alright, but it provided me with two issues. First, I
could catch the head of the bolt which it appeared that I did
more than once, thus bending the bolt. Secondly, because
of the way the frame was designed, dirt and mud and other yech
filled the cavity where the nut was, making it virtually impossible
to remove the nut by normal means. I ended up having to grind
the head of the bolt off to get the plate off. When I did get
the nut out of the frame it was well rusted onto the end of
the bent bolt - or at least what was left of it.
The original Tomken plate installed |
Notice the damage at the front of the bolt |
Of course
the other thing that one notices almost immediately in comparing
the two skid plates is that the Kilby plate does not stick down
as far as the Tomken plate. If you look at the next picture it
should give you and idea of how much more clearance exists with
the Kilby plate.
You can see how much taller the Tomken plate is |
Also note the side protection (and obvious self-promotion) on the Kilby Plate |
PAGE 2 --->>>