I believe an aluminum skid plate will work for my 4/4 to help provide protection, however If your mission is hardcore rock crawling you expect to drag/slide and bounce your Morgan over rocks, then steel plates may still be your best option.
The reduced weight of aluminum, the shear strength and improved hardness and toughness over not having anything to me is far better than having no protection at all.
I’m not entirely sure its worth the extra cost vs. steel, but I will say an engineered aluminum solution does offer protection and an overall weight saving and with a lower weight, ease of install is a nice thing too.
In the end though, its a tough call and more of a personal choice.
In some respects, the steel seems to win hands down when it comes to overall engineering properties on paper, but in reality, it may be better to have a skid plate fail in some cases rather than have that potential energy transfer on to the cross member, for example it may be better to shear off a part of your skid plate at EXTREME stresses with an aluminum plate than it would be to absorb said forces on a steel plate and potentially break off bolts etc........ In other words, the failure of the skid plate may, in fact, be the skid plate doing its job...
I’m not a trained engineer, I’m a carpenter and joiner by trade.....
Extreme Rock Crawling can be akin to the local high street pillow humps, speed humps, Steel Ferry ramps or just the plain old Stately Home entrance gates!
In the development process, the Prototype was made of 5mm thick T7075 aluminium and is a clone of the 3mm Stainless steel Rub plate on sale now.
The Prototype is still on the Wolf Cafe Race protecting the delicate brake pipe and curved part of the chassis that hangs low, it does show the scars of time with signs of deforming and deep scraping from all the EXTREME ROCK CRAWLING ON THE HIGH STREET AND NATIONAL TRUST STATELY HOMES!
After of some 7000miles of product testing we moved to Stainless Steel, to provide a product that will have long durability for our customers and not a throw away product that needs replacing.
There are a lot of damaged chassis, scraped, dented with galvanise removed at point of impact. The Rub Plate is as small as possible not to increase the possible contact area of the chassis with a folded leading edge front and rear to help stop a Mog getting hung up.
Anything larger in width would increase the the forces transferred to the chassis crossmember as it would act as a leaver.
