Greetings all.
So here's the deal. I picked up a Mopar gas tank skid plate for my '06 Liberty yesterday from my local dealership (fortunately one that was not forced out of business.) I get it home, tear into the box and find the giant tank cover, a bag of six bolts and a set of absolutely minimalist instructions. No biggie.
I backed my Jeep up onto a set of ramps so that I could get my fat booty under the vehicle with room to work, then came up with a little rig to hold the skid plate more or less in place while I put in the bolts.
Now I encounter a problem. The bolts seem to be too big to thread into the holes in the frame. The bolts go in just enough to seat, but for the life of me I could not get any of the bolts to thread all the way in. Here are the bolts in question...
The only numbers on the bolts apparently refer to the hardness of the metal. The bolt head is 18mm, and a 1/2" nut almost goes onto the end (although the threads were different.) Is this a half-inch bolt, or maybe 12mm?
As I mentioned, the instructions were pretty much useless...about a dozen sheets in various languages telling me "raise skid plate...install 6 bolts...torque to 55-75 ft-lbs" (or, for our Norwegian friends out there, "hev glideplaten, monter 6 bolter, trekk til med 75-90 Nm.") Nowhere on the sheet does it mention what size the bolts are or even what size socket it used to drive them in.
The skid plate itself lines up just fine (although one of the bolt holes is right above the exhaust pipe, which might make installation a bit more of a challenge than I've already described.) This view is of the right side of the tank, with the front of the vehicle to the top:
So, with all this in mind, I pose this question: Is it likely that some overpaid Canadian Mopar worker put the wrong size bolts in the box, or is it more likely that I'm just a 98-pound weakling who is just waiting for some steroid-addled bodybuilder to kick sand in my face? And if the aforementioned Canadian Mopar worker did screw up, then what size bolts do I need?
(We are currently at T-minus 40 days and counting to the Great Moab and Ouray Expedition of Ought Nine, so I have the entire month of August to figure this out.)
