Tag: Flare

2022 Ford Maverick Fender Flares by Air Design Installation

updat­ed 11/13/2022

N.B. I am a DIY­er with no auto­mo­tive exper­tise

  • Cost: $669 + tax
  • Dif­fi­cul­ty: Easy
  • Mate­ri­als: Fend­er Flares, Instruc­tion Sheet, 16 retain­er clips, Auto­mo­tive Trim Removal Tools/Retainer Clip Removal Tool (or a screw­driv­er, but much eas­i­er with the tools), rub­bing alco­hol, paper tow­el, polyurethane sealant, scissors/knife, tape, stool (option­al)

Ship­ping

Pret­ty tall box, light
OEM

They each come inside a sleeve
Stamped with the item part

Instal­la­tion

Instruc­tion sheet and fend­er flare

Wipe the install loca­tion with alco­hol, then remove the 5 retain­er clips (3 on the door side and 2 on the front end mak­ing sure there are 3 in between).

NOTE: The low­est clip on the door-side is a short clip as com­pared to the longer clips all the oth­ers have. This makes re-instal­la­tion impos­si­ble, so while you’re not sup­posed to remove the 3 towards the front of the Mav­er­ick, I swapped the mid­dle clip with the short one which fits per­fect­ly.

Remove these 3
Remove the blues, Keep the reds

To dry fit and mark the align­ment points, you place, and rese­cure 3 of the retain­er clips (don’t have to push them in all the way).

Dry fit
Don’t have to push the clip all the way in, you’ll take it out in a sec­ond

Instruc­tions called for a grease pen to mark the align­ment, but I used painter’s tape as a guide. Less cleanup.

Remove the clips and the fend­er flare, then per the instruc­tions, cut the 3M tape in the mid­dle and tape them off. Hon­est­ly, before I real­ized I could use a plas­tic pry tool to help, this was the longest, most frus­trat­ing part of the instal­la­tion. It’s impos­si­ble to get the edges peeled up with­out nails! The pry tool made it a cinch.

NOTE: As I’ll post a pic­ture a lit­tle fur­ther down, just peel most of 3M lin­er at the bot­tom part of the flare (clos­est to the wheel). Oth­er­wise, it’s real­ly hard to pull it off lat­er.

Pry tool is very help­ful here
Peel and secure more of the bot­tom piece than I did here.

Polyurethane sealant. I used Auto­mo­tive Amaz­ing Goop because I hap­pened to have it on hand. The lit­tle noz­zle I bought for it is super-duper help­ful. Use your sealant in the built-in chan­nel

Here we go! Same as before, place the flare on, line it up, secure it with the 3 clips. Now with pres­sure as you go, pull the red 3M lin­er off.

Pull and press

As men­tioned above, the low­est 3M lin­er got stuck under­neath and was dif­fi­cult to remove, so just pull most it off before plac­ing the flare. Makes it much eas­i­er.

Stuck. Had a bit of a time try­ing to get it out after every­thing else is secure

Yay! Here are the 2 front sides! After doing the first, the 2nd is very easy.

Mid­way point!

AAAAND here is where I hit a snag. As it turns out, the rear retain­er clips are ALL the small/short clips. And there are 7 on either side that need to be used. I tried, but they are way too short to be able to hold the rear flares in place. Thanks, Ford, for that heads up! So, I have ordered what I think is the equiv­a­lent of the OE clips and then a set of gener­ic clips just in case.

The installed flares look good, though. 🙂

CONTINUED!

The retain­er clips from Ama­zon arrived and, wow! I can’t even tell them apart!

Old vs new

Alrighty, then, let’s get installing! Removed the 7 stub­by clips from the rear. Here’s an image for size com­par­i­son. I said ear­li­er that the most time-con­sum­ing part of this install was peel­ing the 3M liner…it is not. The most time-con­sum­ing part is try­ing to remove these stub­by clips. They spin all around the place and it’s more dif­fi­cult than the longer clips to get a good hold. You get into the groove after a time, though.

com­par­i­son

Dur­ing the dry-fit, new, longer retain­er clips work per­fect­ly!

Peel, then secure!

Installed! Looks like I’m going to need to go back and apply trim restore again…the fend­er flares are clear­ly new­er

Repeat on the oth­er side! Now…I will add a warn­ing here, because after doing 3 of them I was get­ting a bit cocky. For the very last flare, I decid­ed NOT to do a dry-fit/align­ment tape. Don’t do that. It end­ed up fit­ting just off-kel­ter to where the retain­ing clips would­n’t even go all the way in, but the adhe­sive had already stuck and there was no going back.

It’s done! Here’s a before and after install pic­ture of the last flare.

Com­ple­to!! It’s amaz­ing how much dif­fer­ent the Mav­er­ick looks with the fend­er flares on! I hon­est­ly can’t real­ly remem­ber what it looked like before!

Notes

  • They look real­ly good. Real­ly.
  • Instal­la­tion was an over­all breeze after I pro­cured the prop­er parts. As you can see in my pic­tures, I do not have a dri­ve­way, but nev­er had to move my car out of the park­ing space to install these.
  • After a week of dri­ving, the flares give notice­ably more drag and there­fore reduce the gas effi­cien­cy. That part I’m not as big a fan of, espe­cial­ly since mine is a hybrid. Then I start­ed won­der­ing if the cab spoil­er would help the aero­dy­nam­ics at all or is sim­ply anoth­er cos­met­ic thing? The inter­net is not yield­ing any real infor­ma­tion about that. Hmmm…next addi­tion? 😀