So... the next morning...
We rolled out of camp, and to the gas station in the town nearby as we had a long day of driving ahead of us, and would need to fill up both the on-board tanks in the Jeeps and our auxiliary fuel. We'd need every drop.
I had just finished filling up the Jeep and the aux tank, and was going to get in the Jeep, and I noticed a HUGE puddle of oil right underneath the driver door. I alerted the guys that were at the gas station with me, and I radioed to the rest of the crew which was at the other gas station across the street.
In a gas station parking lot on the morning of day 2 of a five day expedition is where my trip would end.
Leaving the engine off, one of the guys towed my Jeep to the gravel parking lot beside the gas station, and we went to work looking for the leak. Most of the guys (the mechanically inclined of the group) lended some muscle trying to wrestle the bolts loose that were holding the MetalCloak UnderCloak engine oil pan skid, so that we could drop the skid and get a better look. It took almost everything all of us had in us to get those bolts loose. Even with impact drivers on hand, they weren't moving those bolts and we had to use good ol' fashioned elbow grease to get them off.
We discovered a small puncture on the driver's side in the upper engine oil pan. It appeared that there was extremely tight clearance between the driver side front skid plate bracket, which secures the front of the engine oil pan skid to the driver's side motor mount, and the upper engine oil pan. The oil pan is aluminum and the skid bracket is hardened 1/4" steel. Where the bracket had a slight bend in it to allow for driveshaft clearance during suspension cycling is where it made contact with the oil pan.
We wrestled the bracket off the motor mount and one of my buddies handed me a stick of QuikSteel. He's put over 500,000 miles on dirt bikes and is big in the Adventure Rider community, and based on experience from that, he always carries a stick of the stuff with him.
He showed me how to plug the hole with QuikSteel, and we waited for it to set. I bought oil at the gas station, and we filled up the engine and, reluctantly, I turned the engine on. I crawled underneath to make sure there were no leaks, since the engine was now pressurized.
The QuikSteel patch held, and I was sent back to Denver with a vehicle escort, as one of the guys on the trip needed to return home for family reasons. The rest of the convoy proceeded to the next destination.
It's unexpected situations like these when I am thankful that I keep good company with a lot of collective experience. When you're on expedition, you've got to have a good crew.
During the trip back to Denver, I kept an eye on the oil pressure and we stopped at each major town to check for leaks. When I got back into cellphone range, I placed a call to MetalCloak. They asked when I had purchased my skids, and I told them around July 2016. I was then informed they had since redesigned the driver's side motor mount bracket. They told me they would get the redesigned driver side bracket as well as a new passenger side bracket, and all new hardware for the oil pan skid out to me ASAP, and 2 days later, the brackets and hardware showed up in the mail. They also told me to go get my oil pan replaced and send them the invoice; I did and, about a week later, I had a reimbursement check in hand.
I am putting that information up front, because I want to highlight that, after the fact, they stood by their product, and made me whole.
BUT...
A part doesn't get redesigned for the fun of it; this was obviously a known issue (and they admitted as much), which is why they redesigned the part to provide more clearance between the engine oil pan and the bracket.
When a part has to be redesigned because it is causing catastrophic-level failures in peoples' vehicles, I feel a recall is in order.
MetalCloak has a presence on social media (including a Facebook page and an owners' group on Facebook) and forums, they have the capability of taking website orders (which means they have some sort of invoicing or CRM system that would have order history information), and an email newsletter. All of these are channels through which they could have informed customers of this issue and offered a replacement bracket BEFORE failure.
I am still pretty pissed about this situation and it's been a little over 5 months. A trip - an experience I can never get back, and vacation days I took from work - was effectively stolen from me. Had we not stopped for gas, this could have cost me (or, rather, MetalCloak) an engine and a very, very expensive tow. Had this happened overnight, it would have been a very expensive tow out of the campground. Had this happened to me, or anyone else, while they were out in their Jeep in a remote area alone, it could have cost someone a life.
Think about all the remote places we take our vehicles. While I don't prefer to go out alone, I sometimes do, and many times I am without cellphone signal. If this had happened out in the middle of the desert with no cell reception for miles and miles, it could have been a life or death situation depending on level of preparedness. One thing this incident highlighted to me was the importance of a personal GPS device like a SPOT or a Garmin InReach. This incident and a few non-starts in my brand new Sprinter van due to a bad switch in the transmission resulted in my purchasing a Garmin InReach.
So while, in the end, MetalCloak made me whole, I feel like there should have absolutely been a recall when this known issue was resulting in engine oil pans being breached. Waiting for a failure to occur to replace a part works for some parts, when the failure does not result in an immobilized vehicle. But in this case? It's absolutely unacceptable.
Their suspension has performed flawlessly, and I am still very happy with it. Other than this issue, their skid plates have taken a beating and held up extremely well. Their manufacturing quality is excellent, and I understand that stuff happens and sometimes you don't get a design right the first time around - and admittedly, I was an early adopter of this UnderCloak skid system, and sometimes, that's the way things go when you're an early adopter of a product. Their customer service is some of, if not, the best in the industry. I have seen them replace parts on their own dime when failure has occurred due to no fault in their design, but rather abuse or lack of proper maintenance from the customer. So, this ordeal leaves me very conflicted.
I was hesitant to post this information online, mainly because I don't want to give fodder to the MetalCloak haters like the idiots at Wayalife... Eddie Oh, and his little band of morons - on that subject, that site is garbage, and it's "pay to play" with Eddie... if a manufacturer doesn't line his pockets, he badmouths them.
