And some more stuff that I have been working on .. the mud-flaps.
Check any car with stock mud-flaps, and the story is the same : short mud-flaps, that are more ornamental in nature. And hardly do the job that they are intended to do. The Sumo was no exception, and I had extened the front mud-flaps to effectively block the slush from splashing on to the side-step. It was but natural to try something similar on the Ikon.
Didnt do much ground work .. but found myself at Manipal motors for a set of the Sumo's mud-flaps. Rs 355 for a set of four, with the word " TATA " in bold. Not that it matterd. The trickier part was to get the lenghts & alignment right. Time & patience were going to be the key.
Had to get the wheels off to access the plastic panel. The flap is fixed to the stock lining with nuts & bolts. Need to get a horizontal strip of metal between the upper nut-bolts & the lower set also - this will make the flaps
sit better.
Additional support is in the form of the small metal strip on the lower, inner edge for the front flap, and upper inner edge for the rear flaps.
For the rear flap, there was a hook kind of project to which this has been fixed to. No drilling into the metal, though had to drill into the rear bumper to hold the flaps using those two pieces of metal strips.
The rear view, after fixing the flaps :
And the two sides:
Cost of flaps : Rs 355/- for the four. Other sundry items like nuts-&-bolts were about 20/-. Got those strips from Satya .. left-overs from Auto-cop installations. But the time was where it took much more than I expected .. two sunday's. May be much faster if I had access to a hoist / hydraulic lifts like in the garages.
And was it worth the effort ? Well, you decide ..
The splashing, after a lght rain :
That was without the flaps, and is not very different with the OE mud-flaps.
And with the flaps :
One thing that needs to be done to make this complete is the metal strips for the front flaps. Found that the flaps 'flap' at high speeds - when I am at 110+. Saw that during the last airport trip about a month back. Unless I do that, the flaps may tear away at the support points where I have drilled holes for the bolts.
I just dont understand : how much would it cost the manufacturers to extend the mud-flaps by 2-3 inches ? Definitely not a bomb. But those 2-3 inches of extra plastic can make such a big difference in how effective the flaps are.
All in all, a fairly good try & out come. Having done it all at home with just the basic tools like the stock jack (so when I am working on one wheel, only that wheel is raised). Was tricky to get a consistent height on all four flaps, and also to get all of them horizontal. While the four flaps may not be precisely aligned and you can even notice a slight inlcine in the rear flaps, it still looks good enough. And importantly, it Works !