After having to deal with a blowout yesterday, we wanted to let you all know how glad we were that we made this modification to our 97 TM.
The new sheetmetal we installed was pretty banged up around the tire, but with all the surrounding foam to absorb the force of the separating tire tread, it caused no damage to the TM itself in the area of the wheel well.
A small piece of sheetmetal under the TM right behind the wheel well was damaged, but we can easily repair it.
The tire installer was pretty impressed with our modification! We put on two new Goodyear Marathon tires.
This link to the Wetherbee's site is still active and shows the details of how to do the modification:
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~jwetherbee1/
Thank you Joe and Ann for posting this and to Hal and the others who helped!