Technical thoughts on oil pan skid plates?

my car is low enough that it has bottomed out hard enough and often enough that the pan is looking pretty rough.
right now I plan to drop the pan, straighten it out and weld a skid plate to it.
but before I do I'd like to hear and hopefully see what you guys have done.
I don't see welding or bolting it to the frame, it will need to be on the pan..

 

Willys CJ2A and 3A Jeeps had a skid plate welded to the bottom of the pan. If hit hard enough they still break at the welds and leak. Maybe you need to raise your car an inch or so.

 

I’d raise my car a little. My son lost an engine when his wife was driving because of that!

 

skid plate makes it even lower

 

Blasphemy!!!!

id raise up an engine before raising a car.

Weld a plate to the pan or raise the engine

cruise it low with confidence

 

Jeep pan

 

I would want something that bolted to the frame so it had something stronger to distribute any impact it might get. Welding to the pan might be good for the occasional poking style lick, but the impact of a solid hit would just be transferred to the pan sides and rails, possibly bending them. A properly designed skid plate would be higher in front than the rear, creating a ramp to ride over an obstacle instead of hitting it solid.

As long as it is above the wheel skid line, it would work. But, if it rides below the skid line, a sudden blowout and you’d be without steering control. Some try it and get away with it, others not so much. If your oil pan is that close to the skid line, I would consider raising the engine if you have the vertical clearance up top.

 

Ps Do a search as there are older threads on this Don’t weld anything to the pan. You’ll just destroy it sooner. Skid plates should be attached to the frame. As raising the engine might not be workable.

One question. The lowest part of my rod’s engine isn’t the pan but the lower edge of the bell housing. You have anything else too low?

See if you can get a low profile pan. Consider a dry sump oiling system.

My solution was to put wheelie bar wheels on the inside of the lower 4-bar bolts. They work fine. I rarely hear them hit, but I’m on my second pair and haven’t scraped any part of the engine or transmission yet.

 

The skid plate hangs lower than the oil pan and will scrape/hit more often than the oil pan did. With it welded to the pan, any of these more frequent impacts the skid plate takes will be transferred directly into the pan with greater leverage and may cause the pan to deform worse than not having it in the first place. Even though your skid plate will probably be pretty thick, the pan is still pretty thin tin. A hard hit to the skid plate will make the pan want to mushroom out on the sides and deform the pan rails.

For the skidplate to be effective, it really needs to be isolated from the pan somehow.

 

Seen jeep pans beat up hard

took it pretty good

I’ve busted a pan. I learned to drive better. Raising the ride never entered the brain
An 1/8 inch on a pan isn’t like he’s dropping the car another inch.

General road rash scraping isn’t like rock hopping

 

The trans. pan on one of my cars has a heavy plate around it.
I can probably high-center, and rock the car back and forth on the plate if I centered it carefully!

Mike

 

I sectioned the oil pan on my Roadster, as well as the oil pickup. The oil pan was the lowest part of the car, and the rest of the car is pretty low. I sectioned the oil pan after I hit the crown in the road and the oil pan cracked. It's now been on the car well over 20 years. But to answer your question, a skid plate is just fine, I'd try to bolt it to the frame though.

 

I think I'd rather bottom out on a skid plate compared to my oil pan. Also, I think some people run a bigger capacity pan than what they usually need.

 

Anthony brings up an interesting thought. Could you shim the mounts up a bit without messing up the driveline angle, clearance at the bellhousing and steering and keep the same exhaust? Is it 1/4 inch or 1/2 inch divots in the pan?

 

A roadster I built with a Red Ram had a problem rubbing in one spot of the pan. I added a 10 ga steel pad to that area.

 

The pan on my T bucket was seriously low and the way the T was setup it was just in the right spot to smash down on speed bumps that you hit a little bit too fast. I think JD Fikes suggested putting a skid plate on it during one of the times we pulled the pan after work so I could clean it up and he could weld it up.

 

My plans are a skid plate welded to the bottom of my pan when it comes off to be cleaned and a new gasket added.

Like Anthony said, I don't see an 1/8" plate losing much ground clearance and I'd rather have an impact spread over a much larger, more rigid area vs a small thin spot of sheet metal.

...

 

What if you sectioned the oil pan and added some volume to the sides like a road race pan?

 

Limiting factor is the oil pump , generally they're pretty close to the bottom of the pan .

 

I assume that's the oil pick up? 3/16 - 1/2 or 5/16 - 3/8 depending on your reference material.

 

It is the oil pickup that would be the concern, but it is not hard to shorten it to suit.
This was already mentioned in post #12 (see below).

 

Oil escaping following a chance meeting of pan with road surface. It contrasts nicely with the granite paving in the heart of a well to do market town. Oops.

Chris

 

I remember my late Alfisto cousin lamenting the need to hide all that beautiful Italian alloy castingness at the bottom of an Alfa-Romeo twin-cam. Unfortunately it tended sooner or later to collide with reality otherwise.


They all tend to follow this fireplace grate/not quite medieval yettwork pattern.

 

Speaking of medieval, reminds me of some type of chastity belt. Lol!

 

Depending on your front suspension we have used traction bar rubbers bolted on top of the lower control arms that will hit on the bottom of the frame rail to soften the impact from wheel stands and limit how far down the front end can go saving the oil pan.

 

At the risk of a horrible tangent, most of that kind of stuff turns out not to be medieval at all. The bulk is Victorian, made especially as curiosities for exhibition purposes, and the rest is 16th/17th century at the oldest.

 

You might want to think about raising your car. Local kid had a VW Golf that was slammed to the ground and he caught a raised manhole cover. The damage was too much to repair and his car was totaled and the insurance company refused to cover his loss. If you weld a skid plate to your pan and are going fast enough you probably will shear the pan bolts and then it's over. The weakest part will always break, so no matter how much you brace your pan, at speed something will fail.

 

Dang
This place is getting as bad a face book

 

@Paul
I would have to see the car but you should be able to make a proper skid plate that bolts to the frame. I would lean in that direction if it were me.

I recall a car or two over the years that were not off road cars that sat low enough to have skid plates. If you recall when you and me were young speed bumps became a problem for cars that were built in the '50s and '60s. Skid plates were the solution to not ruin the stance of a really cool car.

 

Putting a 1/4" shim under each motor mount as well as the trans mount should help. Then add a 1/16" skidplate to the pan with a rolled front edge and it should help some. I'd also consider raising the car slightly as well rather than risk losing an engine. While a pan scraping might seem inconsequential, as time goes on it may develop a crack or leak that goes unnoticed.