Save Your Rig: Rokblokz Mud Flaps for the Jeep Wrangler JL
Off-road vehicles take plenty of abuse – our paint has marring and scratches from tree limbs, rocks, and other trail debris; our undercarriage is rusty and scuffed from the unfortunate encounters with rocks; and there’s no part of the Jeep that has avoided a nice crust of mud. For that reason, we invest in body armor, skid plates, and any number of protective accessories to try and limit the damage and costly repairs that accompany off-road driving.
There’s something fun about having a Jeep covered in mud the first few times it happens. But by the 99th car wash, I was looking for options to minimize the amount of time I spent cleaning the Jeep and for tools to help protect the paint and body from debris kicked up by the knobby tires.
Enter RokBlokz. The name itself tells you exactly what these mud flaps are designed to do – block rocks.
The Utah-based company isn’t some mega conglomerate; they are a family-owned shop that started in 2011 making mud flaps for small and zippy cars, like Subaru’s. As word spread about the quality of their product, they’ve met increased demand by now offering mud flaps for all sorts of cars, from the lowered mall crawler to the off-road and lifted mud machines.
What makes their flaps unique for the Jeep Wrangler JL is two things: materials and mounting.
RokBlokz Unique Rubbery Stuff
The materials used to manufacture mud flaps tend to fall into one of two categories: rigid plastic or super soft rubber. Rigid plastic is cheap and easy to produce, but it’s not a good option for anyone who takes their rig off-road. Jamming a rigid mud flap on a rock would almost certainly lead to cracking and damaging the flap, plus the risk of incurring damage to the vehicle in the process. In contrast, a mud flap that is too soft can get ‘sucked up’ under the tire when travelling at speed and be damaged for making contact with the spinning tire (look at tractor-trailers on the road to see a good example of this).
RokBlokz has achieved a near-perfect hybrid of rigidity and softness. Their flaps utilize a polyurethane-based material that has a proprietary blend of ingredients, allowing the flap to have enough rigidity while still maintaining flex. The result? A flap that can bend over obstacles on the trail while not being so pliable that it looses shape or form. And unlike other plastics that can become rigid when exposed to cold temperatures, the material that RokBlokz are made from is designed to remain flexible even in the cold, so your flaps perform well at all temps.
Each set of RokBlokz is produced in the United States, and much of the work to make the flaps is done by hand, though they also use CNC machines to precisely and perfectly cut out the flaps. For the Jeep Wrangler JL, you can also order your flaps with an optional pop-out that allows the stock Rubicon rock rails to slide through the flap for a seamless finish. Alternatively, if like us, you’ve replaced the stock rock rails with another option, you can order the flaps without the cut-out; just let them know when you place the order.
RokBlokz are offered in two sizes - normal and XL. The XL size is designed to accommodate wider and larger tires like our 35” Falken Wildpeak ATs, and they offer good coverage of the tire’s width. The mud flaps can also be colored to match the personality of your particular rig. The flap itself is offered in a rainbow of colors, and the RokBlokz logo inside the flap can be further colorized for a unique color-combination to highlight your rig. We opted for a simple black flap with a red logo, thinking the red accent would pair nicely with the red accents on the Rubicon branding.
Mounting (and Un-Mounting) RokBlokz
One of the more unique things about RokBlokz is that they are easy to mount and then remove when you are on the trail, providing you peace-of-mind that your flaps won’t be in the way when you’re heading down more technical trails. This is not unlike our door side steps we’ve installed; they have grenade pins that allow for the quick removal of the step so as to not get hung up on the trail.
For starters, mounting RokBlokz on the Jeep Wrangler JL does require the factory fenders, particularly for the front set. The back ones could be mounted even with after-market fenders since they attach directly to the frame of the vehicle, but the front mud flaps require mounting to two spots on the factory fenders.
RokBlokz includes all the hardware needed for installation in the order. One of the first steps involves pressing M6 nuts into pre-cut holes in the flaps. This process doesn’t take long, but can be a little arduous because of the precise fit of each nut. I found that lightly seating the nut into the hole and then flipping the flap over to press it in against a hard surface (my kitchen counter) worked well, but suspect you could use a rubber mallet to lightly tap them into place.
The front set mounts in a matter of seconds using three thumbwheel screws. All hardware is included, so it’s just a matter of removing two plastic “Christmas tree” connectors and attaching a few slide-on nut thingies to attach the flap to the vehicle. I don’t know all the technical jargon, but fret not — each set of RokBlokz includes instructions that make install a breeze.
Depending on how you may have already modified your vehicle, mounting the rear mud flaps could be a little more involved. If your vehicle is stock, you’ll need to access and move a bracket that is part of the rear bumper assembly. This isn’t particularly challenging - it requires you to loosen 4x 16mm bolts. In our case, we’ve already removed that bracket from a previous modification to our rear bumper, so we didn’t need to endeavor to remove that component. However, we no longer had the stock bolts that mount to that spot, so it did take a quick trip to the hardware store to acquire some new bolts for mounting the bracket. No big deal — but remember to buy stainless! All told, installation of all four mud flaps was achieved in less than an hour.
Once installed, the RokBlokz can be removed easily by removing the thumbwheel screws that hold each flap into place, making removal and re-installation on the trail something that could be done at the same time you air down/up your tires. However, the ease of removal does mean you’ll want to be careful to ensure the screws don’t loosen on you while driving, and a bit of loctite could be installed on the screws to prohibit accidental loosening.
Verdict
The day after I installed my new RokBlokz, we had a heavy rain and there was a lot of standing water on the roadways. In the past, driving through one of those puddles would have caused a wave of water spray up along the side of the Jeep as our knobby tires flung the water. With the RokBlokz installed, the spray was contained to inside the wheel well area, with almost no water deflecting out and up at the car.
Mud flaps are a weird thing to review — they either work or they don’t. There isn’t a lot of space for middle ground here, and I can unequivocally state that the RokBlokz work. I’ll never be able to report to you about the paint chips that could have occurred, because I’ll never know I missed them — but I can tell you that my Jeep has stayed significantly less muddy and far cleaner since the flaps were installed. This alone tells me they have been effective in keeping the mud on the ground where it belongs.
Beyond effectiveness, I appreciate the ease-of-installation, ease-of-removal for trails, and overall business model of RokBlokz. I am always in favor of supporting a US company over some cheapo Chinese product, and respect the innovation and labor required to deliver mud flaps for so many different types of vehicles at an affordable price.
If I was to nit-pick anything about RokBlokz, it’d be that I would have liked the option for an orange logo color on my flaps. They offer orange material, but it’s not the same shade of orange as the Jeep, so I opted for a black flap. However, a little touch of orange on the logo would have really made it feel a little more tailored to my specific rig. In the grand scheme of things, this is such a dumb little nit-pick that I’m almost embarrassed to be putting it out there. But it also speaks volumes about the quality of the product and installation, because that really is the only thing I can find to critique. So maybe it’s really a win?
All-in-all, I give the RokBlokz a hearty endorsement and look forward to using them to keep British mud off the Jeep soon! Order yours here.