I pieced together a full Mazda appearance package and installed it last week. Is it me or did Mazda make this way harder than it had to be? What a pain in the @$$! I am debating on doing the front splash guards. It seems that something is missing up front with the side flares. Hopefully they are easier to install than the rest of the kit.

 

I just finished installing the appearance package myself as well. I agree to an extent, and some parts (AHEM - SIDE FLARES) could have certainly been easier.

I thought that the front dam was pretty easy to install myself tho!

I also installed the front splashes...certainly finishes the package nicely. It took me 45 minutes to installs the splashes, while every other single component (of the 3 in the package) took me 3 hours.

I say go for it.

 

I thought all of the pieces were relatively simple with the exception of the side aero flares. They really weren't too difficult either, they just took a little bit of time.

 

They give you EXACT templates, step-by-step instructions in fairly good non-Engrish and all the hardware.
How much easier could it be? You want the stuff to stay attached to the car, don't you?

 

didnt say it was hard....just a pain in the *** and time consuming

 

Yeah. It gets and faster each time you do it.

 

amen to that. I'm still dancing around with trying to close in a minor gap in the front section of the passenger side sideskirt. Already spent almost 2 hours trying to engineer a way to close it up.

 

Much more satisfying than paying the dealer $200 bucks to put in on though! And they don't have a lot of experience putting them on if you're in a small town dealership.

Front splash guards are definately the easiest of the four OEM parts.

 

The plastic clips that are included don't have much "bite".
I replaced all of mine with bigger "GM" style clips and that got it good and tight.

 

yea i couldn't help but notice when i pulled out the front portion earlier today that half the reason why my gap is still there is because the front clip isn't even snapping and staying into place. I can hear it snap in when i apply heavy pressure but it immediately pops out when releasing pressure. Looks like the extra 3M adhesive i bought it gonna have to try and pick up the slack for 'ole Mazda's design flaw

I wouldn't have thought any GM clip would be able to integrate into a Mazda body part.

 

So I went to take off me passenger sideskirt to reapply new tape and try and close up a gap I had in the front...only to snap off 2 of the 4 clips

I was so furious! I can't believe that mazda engineered these things so friggin stupid.

On a lighter note, I did get the gap closed up enough to have only parts of the tape visable, which was invisable once i tossed a little touch up paint on it!

So what was the trick? I heated the tape up with a blowdryer first, which makes it more flexable and tacky, and it stuck like a champ!

So even though i'm 2 clips down on the passanger side, I'm thinking I still made forward motion...

 

I did this just a few days ago... its easy... at first I tryed to just get away with doing the side flares with just the double sided tape... didnt work.. gotta drill the holes in the side and put the little clips that the kit comes with... that would be the hardest thing to do but doing it was easy if you have the instructions with the cut out templates... its all easy...

 

glad to hear your install went good bro. Like I said, a relatively easy install as long as you take much attention to detail and follow every instruction carefully.

All went well for me except the one minor detail of the front end of the passenger side skirt. Everything else was time consuming but extremely easy.