For whatever reason I have not really seen a lot of the Iron Baltic products used on this site, but if you look on one of the Razr or Can-Am forums they are both pretty popular and highly regarded. I choose to go with the HDPE skids as they are known to be very strong while at the same time having a low coefficient of drag when going over rocks. When gouged they tend not to gouge and “stick” on rocks, but will rather slide over them. I also really like the way the footwell skid plates wrap around the outside of the footwell itself as I have kind of torn up the outside edges of the footwells on our X2 while going over things.
So on to the skid plates themselves… First of all when you go to Iron Baltics website Iron Baltic – start page they will tell you if a product says “in stock” it will ship the next day and if it says “production time 21 days” it will ship once made. When I ordered my set on 5/7/15 it said “production time 21 days” so I was fully prepared to have to wait, but the very next day 5/8/15 I received an e-mail from them with a tracking number! :smoker: Now, Estonia is a small country just to the East of Russia, and it is roughly 5,250 miles from Dallas TX. But I’ll be damned if some oversized pigeon on crack was not able to take off from Estonia on May the 8th 2015 and have those skid plates to my house in McKinney TX on May 11th 2015…. I ordered a freaking set of lug nuts from somewhere in Oregon on the same day and they are still not here yet, but my skid plates from 5,250 miles away are!
The plates came tightly bundled in an easy ½” of shrink wrapped plastic. Once I spent 15 minutes with a razor knife trying to get the plastic off without losing one or more fingers I then found all of the various pieces to be zip tied together for good measure. The hardware package was further taped to the front plate which bolts to the winch bracket, wrapped up in another ½” of shrink wrap plastic, and in a zip lock bag as well. These guys are quite serious about their packaging…
When I finally had it all unwrapped I started to lay the parts out to take a look and was immediately impressed, this stuff is NICE. First of all this is not some flimsy lightweight plastic set, the set had a shipping weight of around 23kg which is over 50lbs and the plates are a full 10mm thick. The second thing I noticed is that every single piece is very obviously CNC cut, the edges run hot, straight and true, and everything is just very crisp and exact. From there I started to look at the various bends… they are all perfect. I do not know if they use a mandrel to form them over or if it some sort of computerized machine, but the parts are just beautiful. It looks like some of the 90 degree bends were made by first cutting a bevel in the upper surface and then heating the plastic to make the angle. From there it appears that the plastic was welded of fused back together where the bevel had been made, I just cannot see any other way to get such a crisp corner in this 10mm thick material. I have some pictures that I am going to post so you can see what I am talking about.
Next I looked at the hardware and brackets. All of the bolts have “8.8” on top of them which should be plenty strong to hold skid plates on, like if you sheer one of these then you probably have a host of issues to worry about other than your broken bolt. One thing that I would suggest doing before assembly would be to separate the nuts/bolts/washer etc into different zip lock bags. A packing sheet with instructions is included and each item was checked off by some person piece by piece. When I went through all of the hardware I found that everything was indeed there, and there is a lot of hardware.
So far I have only mounted the front a-arm guards as I am waiting on my Cecco front and rear braces to arrive so I can install them before going further, I see no need to put everything on just to have to pull it back off in a few days to put the braces on. When I installed the a-arm plates I decided to use some blue locktite on the bolts, I do not think that they would come lose, but I would rather not find out the hard way. The a-arm plates went on without any issues at all, they fit perfectly and the brackets used to hold them on fit like a glove.
As you can tell I am pretty happy with the kit so far, if everything else continues to go on like the a-arm plates did then I will be pretty happy. I did notice that the bottom plate has the cover mostly cut out where the oil filter is located and I will have to use a spiral saw to cut the rest of it out. I would guess that they do this in case you do not want to opening on the bottom but I would rather have it to make oil changes easier. That is about the only thing that I can see where the aluminum kit might be nicer in that most have a removable plate to access the filter and drain plug, but I really do not see it being a problem having an oil filter sized hole in the plate especially seeing as that there is one in the factory plate as well.
I will attach some pictures so that you can see the various pieces and I will update the post once I have the frame braces on and I install the rest of it. I have ordered an ATV Guru front bumper and I anticipate having to make a few modifications to get it on once it arrives, but I still have about 5 or so weeks until it arrives so I am going to get the rest of the skid plates on for now. Let me know if you have any questions and I will try to get them answered.
