Well I spent most of Wednesday and Thursday this past week working on mounting the new APR carbon fiber front splitter to the car. This was my first time ever mounting a wind splitter. It was a learning experience, and they weren't kidding when they said that every splitter install is custom.
I started with putting the car on jack stands and removing the front bumper. I spent about an hour cleaning up the front bumper and getting it ready. Then I went to setting the bumper on the splitter and starting to mock things up. I decided to keep the CS lip on the car, and mount the splitter to it, and the bumper. My first step was properly securing the lip to the bumper itself. When I got the lip it only came with crappy self tapping screws to mount it. I wasn't risking that, so I went to my local hardware store and bought bolts and lock nuts, as well as longer bolts for the splitter, the bolts it came with were way too short to clear the now inch space between the splitter and bumper where the lip was.
My next obstacle was figuring out a way to secure that mentioned gap between the splitter and the bumper (where the lip is). I came up with a pretty simple and effective way to take care of this. I bought a piece of PVC pipe just large enough for the mounting bolts to pass through without the bolt actually touching the PVC. I had to measure the gap between the splitter and bumper for every bolt that I installed.
I ran all bolts through the lip and the bumper to make sure they were mounted solid with no play. So each bolt was ran like this: Bolt/Washer/Splitter/Washer/PVC piece/Washer/Lip/Bumper/Washer/Lock nut. Once everything was mounted, and all bolts secured and tightened I was thrilled. My measurements all lined up, and everything was square. The splitter is very securely mounted to the front bumper and lip now and is NOT going anywhere.
I did run into one issue after installing the splitter, the support rods! The rods supplied were too short to fit from the lip to the place on the bumper where I want them mounted. So I ordered a set of longer support rods from Aeroflow Dynamics (8-10 inch). I am hoping they will be here sometime this week so I can finish the install.
And although I will have successfully mounted the splitter to the car, I am not done with it yet! Once I get the bumper on the car, I will be under the car taking more measurements and drawing things to make mounts to actually chassis mount this beast and make it fully functional!
I will be posting up some pics of this install and everything sometime this coming week/week end when its done.