Fab'd up a skid plate for my e30 m3. The car has been off the road for almost a year now cause I've been doing some rust repair, engine bay repaint, etc. In the process I made my front core support removable because I'm planning on doing an s54 swap at some point and wanted to be able to drop a motor in easily. Since it's now removable I wanted to add some extra rigidity to the front end so I used the tubular cross member from e30 motor werks (peerless) as a starting point but made my own skid because I wanted a custom ///M3 logo in the front. Also I wasn't sure if the motor werks plate would work with the x-brace.
I cut the plate from 1/8" steel on a cnc plasma cutter and plan to add some v-bar reinforcements and a cut out to drain oil..
Cutting on CNC
Tacked parts together, shown with cross member and garagistic x-brace.
Test fitup
Got it test fit and welded in the stubs for the cross brace. Now I need to fully weld the plate and powder coat it.
Can't decide on color though, should I go black or match the color of the car?
Here is a little shot of how I made the core support removable, I cut 4 plates out of 14 gauge steel on the plasma. 2 plates were welded to the frame rails with nuts welded to the back, I just cut some slots in the rails so the nuts could fit through, welds were ground down and smoothed out before filler and paint.
Plates welded to rails
Finished product with support bolted in.
I cut the plate from 1/8" steel on a cnc plasma cutter and plan to add some v-bar reinforcements and a cut out to drain oil..
Cutting on CNC
Tacked parts together, shown with cross member and garagistic x-brace.
Test fitup
Got it test fit and welded in the stubs for the cross brace. Now I need to fully weld the plate and powder coat it.
Can't decide on color though, should I go black or match the color of the car?
Here is a little shot of how I made the core support removable, I cut 4 plates out of 14 gauge steel on the plasma. 2 plates were welded to the frame rails with nuts welded to the back, I just cut some slots in the rails so the nuts could fit through, welds were ground down and smoothed out before filler and paint.
Plates welded to rails
Finished product with support bolted in.
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