I consider this project to be moderately difficult, but only because there's a tight space in which you need to navigate an anchoring bracket and screw it in place. If you are impatient or have large hands, this project will most likely frustrate you something awful. That said, if you want to save what I've seen on the web as over $300 dealers are charging to install these things, read on...
As far as time goes, the first one took a while (I want to say maybe an hour) because there's no instructions online and the paper ones only adequate at best. Like IKEA, they contain only pictures, but unlike IKEA, there's no head-scratching stick figure with a question mark above his head and a toll-free phone number to call. The second only took around 15 minutes.
Before starting, check to make sure you have all the parts: you should have two mud flaps and two anchoring brackets (all four labeled L or R), four screws, and four plastic anchoring tab things (mine were blue).
If you are able to remove the tires, do so, it will make this a lot easier. If not, raise the air suspension to the highest setting (Off-Road Mode). It's not great, but it does give you a little more room.
Lying on your back slide under the rear of your car behind one of your rear wheels. This is from the right side of my vehicle:
Figure 1: The bottom of the right rear corner panel - note the square, fixed anchor bracket in the middle of the picture. |
Press one of the plastic anchor tab things into the square hole of the fixed anchor bracket shown in Figure 1:
Figure 2: Insert one of the plastic anchor tabs into the fixed ancor bracket attached to the corner panel. |
Figure 3: The second mounting screw that needs to be removed. |
Figure 4: A zoomed out view of the rear portion of the wheel well. |
The instructions say to screw this anchor bracket from the kit into the fixed anchor bracket shown in Figure 1 and then when mounting the mud flap screw the middle anchor screw through the wheel well and into the plastic anchor tab on the kit anchor bracket but I found that doing so made it impossible thread the middle screw into the plastic anchor tab. I suspect if I had taken the wheel off, it might have been significantly easier.
I used a pocket knife to poke a hole through the dimple shown above in Figure 4 above and ensured that I could hand thread one of the kit screws through this hole. Then I held up the mud flap in its mounting position and threaded the screw through the hole so that it could hang in place without me holding it (tip: if you thread the screw through so that it actually pokes through it makes attaching to the kit anchor bracket easier):
Figure 5: Loosely thread a kit screw through the mud flap and dimple hole. |
Figure 6: Thread the kit bracket on to the middle anchor screw that goes through the mud flap. |
Figure 7: Take a kit screw and attach the kit anchor bracket to the fixed bracket on the corner panel. |
Figure 8: Tighten the fixed anchor bracket screw first and then the screw that goes through the mud flap. |
Re-attach the top screw (the shorter one) through the mud flap and tighten:
Figure 9: Re-attach the top screw through the mud flap and tighten. |
Figure 10: Re-attach the bottom screw to complete the installation. |
Please let me know if you discover any errors in my installation and I'll update. Thanks.