oem-heavy-jeep-grand-cherokee-gas-tank-skid-plate

You need to disconnect this prior to lowering the support. On the inboard side of the tank, near the middle, there is a plastic flexible conduit attached to the gas tank support structure. I had to do this to prevent strain on the hose connections to the tank. Tie the straps off in a way where it will be easy to tighten them further if needed when you remove and lower the support. Here are some photos showing the straps in place. Once you have both straps fished through, tie them off to convenient tie points on the underside of the Jeep. Getting the straps through on each end is tedious. Then repeat the process on the other end. When you finish getting the strap through on one end, reinsert the bolts and thread them in most of the way. Once you get the strap to the bottom, there are holes in the original support that allow you to grab the strap and direct it back up the other side. To make this easier, I removed the two closest bolts to whichever end I was working on and lifted the tank up with one hand while fishing the strap down with the other. The way I did this was to fish the strap down between the tank and the support on each end. In order to do this, you need to loosen all of the bolts holding the tank up to create a little space to lift the tank up to get the straps under it. You have to thread the straps between the tank and the support. Getting straps in place takes some patience. Here are some of the hoses connected to the tank. The hoses might have been strong enough to hold up the empty tank but there was no way I was going to count on that.

Since there are a lot of hoses connected to the gas tank, I decided to strap it in place so I could remove the support without disconnecting the hoses. Here is what I used to do the installation (I forgot to take a picture of the bracket that attaches to the skid plate with two nuts as shown in the instructions): Don't even think of doing this with a full tank, you could be seriously injured or worse! So, the fairly obvious first step is to get the gas tank as empty as you can (gas weighs roughly 6 lbs per gallon so a full tank with 19.5 gallons weighs about 117 lbs plus the weight of the tank). In reality, you need to remove the existing support structure that holds the gas tank in place and then install the skid plate which then holds the gas tank in place. The instructions imply that you just slip the skid plate over the existing gas tank and fasten it with 5 bolts, a bracket and 2 nuts. Here is what it looks like before you start.

Installing a gas tank skid plate is much more involved than what is shown in the instructions which you can find at

Oem-heavy-jeep-grand-cherokee-gas-tank-skid-plate