My wife who is not very tall wants what she calls pigmy steps so she can climb in with short legs
My issue is that they look to hang very low and would no doubt be an issue on rough tracks. would the rock sliders give any advantage to my short legged lovely wife. Hard to tell without seeing them in the flesh
i would guess not. But any help with my problem would be appreciated
cheers Pete
'My wife,
who is the perfect size but who was not consulted by Ineos when designing this rig, wants what she calls pigmy steps so she can climb in easier with
her perfectly sized legs"
Good lord, Pete. I fixed that for you but you'd best edit before the missus finds it! (Kidding of course!) Having a similarly "perfectly" sized wife myself, steps are handy so I totally hear where she's coming from!
So here's my experience with both sliders and steps -- which one to get depends entirely how you plan to use the vehicle.
Rock sliders, as stickshifter and others have mentioned, need to be able to support the weight of the vehicle. As the name suggests, they are for sliding the vehicle over rocks. If they bend or have any give at all, then they won't work for that function -- they will bend up and cause ancillary damage to panels or stop the doors from working, which is no good at all. You should be able to drag the entire vehicle on a single slider along a rock, even if tires aren't touching the ground. Because of that required robustness, they also serve as excellent jacking points in most cases.
Side steps are for stepping into the vehicle and handy for roof access, so they make living with the vehicle a lot easier day to day - but they are still very useful for mild off-road so long as you see them as 'sacrificial'; a proverbial canary in your off-road coal mine. They are usually quite cheap and bend-able, which means they can serve as an excellent 'early warning system' for your rig if you bite off more than you can chew. It is what I currently have, and they are bent all to heck, but that was helpful to me when it happened as it was cheaper and easier than doing panel damage later on in the trail and it was a warning to back off and take a different route. Sometimes you can eyeball a breakover angle; sometimes you get it a little bit wrong. Steps are good warnings in this situation. I personally prefer sliders but the steps are what came with my current rig, hence I kind of accidentally discovered this 'early warning' benefit.
If you know you are going to be doing technical off road where you are likely to have the weight of the vehicle supported on it's edges instead of the wheels from time to time, the sliders are the way to go. But if you are primarily doing dirt roads or "green laning" with only the occasional jaunt into easy Off Road areas, the side steps can be super handy and preferable. They make living with the vehicle day to day and around town way more pleasant, and if you knock one off a rock or a stump, it'll bend, make a ton of noise, and generally let you know that the trail may be more technical than you are wanting.
I think the best thing for my personal grenadier will be sliders, but side steps are incredibly important as a safety feature, especially if you're keeping stuff on the roof. My plan however is that since they are tubular it should be very easy to design a small step that attaches to them to ease entry/exit and roof access - similar to what was posted on the Land Rover. The other option for roof access is a hinge step -- a folding foot peg that attaches to the hinge bolts -- which I've seen on some JKs, but a slider step is a lot more robust and easier to use and not as high to step to, so in my experience they are safer. The only other step for roof access at the sides tends to be tires, and in muddy terrain that's asking for a broken limb or torn ligament.
