Which Rear Strut Brace?
 

anyone know who made the rear strut brace that goes under the carpet??

i once saw it here but having trouble finding it again.


cusco, tanabe, carbing all have the strut brace over the carpet.


any idea which aftermarket company was it?

We'll be making one soon. Just finished up the majority of our primary exhaust development (cylinder head to the tailpipe) and I'm switching to chassis engineering right now. I've got 3/5 of the control arms mapped out and laid out in 4130 or 6AL-4V tubing w/ either 4130 or 7075 Heim Joints, and we're moving to the strut tower bars next. Also finished up a set of rear sway bar bushing mount gussets tonight.

Our strut bars are very unique, available in AISI 1020 DOM tubing or potentially a lighter weight AISI 4130 DOM tubing option. We have filed a provisional patent on the machined cups that we use to connect the bars to the car. They ensure that the cup has zero movement before taking up deflection of the chassis.

We're still noodling some ideas on how to route the front bar and triangulate to the factory mount points, but the factory front dual bar setup is without a doubt a suboptimal solution for preventing chassis deflection up front. The reason for the twin mounting locations at each end of the factory bars is because the holes in the bars are nearly 1.5x the diameter of the fastener. Also, the factory strut hat mount points aren't as rigid as the strut top itself.

I will emplore anyone who is looking at strut tower bars to avoid the temptation to buy multi-piece billet aluminum variants that are littering the market. I have seen a wide variety of these designs and they have slotted holes, require you to bolt the bar clevis to the hats (they're aluminum, remember) through slotted holes as well and are effectively nothing more than car jewelry. Our bars are generally a single piece monolithic weldment with independent cups on each of the mounting studs/bolts and usually have a multi-bar configuration with stitch welding between the bars (alternated on the top and bottom of the seam). You won't find a more rigid and functional bar on the market.

I'll be posting up some details soon in another thread.

Jason

Jason, are you planning on making a Front strut bar that's a single piece and mounts to the firewall??

There's no benefit to using 4130 in a chassis brace. It isn't any stiffer than 1020 and if you ever load a brace to the point of yielding, you've got bigger problems than chassis flex. ;)

You've got a good point that they have the same modulus of elasticity. :-) All of our bars currently are 1020. :-P

J

Yep. New thread posted.

J