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i posted a topic on this on the old forum but ill do it again

has anyone made a strut brace for an L-series?
pics would be good as i am thinking of welding one up

wrx_nut

I have just made one for the rally car from chromemolly - I still need to get it powder coated but I can take some photos of it if you like.

Jap spec coupes came with one std. But hey, they came standard with an STI body kit and many other bits aswell

yer..pics would be nice so it can give me a few ideas..
thanks

I will take some photos tonight and post them tomorrow.

Heres some pics, sorry about some being a little fuzzy

does a strut brace have to pivot and be adjustable like yours toyRX?
thanks for the pics

There are several schools of thought on this one, and it really depends on what car you are putting it on and what you are trying to achieve.
General principles dictate that when you strengthen any given part of a car you will transfer some of the stress to a diferant part of the car and "may" create a problem elseware. This is what you are doing by adding a strut brace. This is why generally a purpose built race car (ie spaceframed or heavily reinforced) will have a solid strutbrace as the whole car is of a higher strength and can handel the stresses a solid strut brace creates.
In my car I was aiming to eliminate movement of the struttops flexing toward and away from each other which affects handling/ridgedity(sp), typically this is from wheel impacts and sharp heavy loadings. This is why my strut brace has pivots, this allows the towers to move vertically in relation to each other while maintaining the same horozontal spacing. The vertical movement helps relieve the stresses otherwise i would risk shearing off the strut bolts every time i hit a big hole.
The adjustor is used to "dial up" the required tension and also makes instilation/removal easier.

What did you want the strut brace for... racing,street,offroad????

interesting concept...however with those pivots i believe the towers will still beable to move inwards and outwards. or even individually. you are right on them moving up and down...they will do that, but they can also move in/out, or front/back. Mainly because everything is not in-line (because you had to go over the I/C. I could be wrong...but my engineering physics class tells me that thing will just paralelogram.

what i did on my rally car (85 RX) was i got 1/8" plate cut to match the strut tower tops, and i welded them right on.

Then too a piece of roll cage tubing, and bent it so it curved back into the spare tire well...then welded the tube to the firewall also. i then tied this into the plates i welded on the tops.

Then again, i also seam welded my chassis...so...

BTW...if i was you...take that bar off, and remove the nuts you have below the brace. and bolt your strut brace directly to the towers...that looks like 1/8" plate...you will bend that stuff fairly easy

Ideally i would have triangulated back to the firewall but I am planning a different IC to go in there and it was not practical, so I went for the straight one. Yes, I agree there will be tower movement in the forward/back direction, but in/out will be severly restricted (as long as the adjusted is tensioned correctly), the raised crossbar does not affect the horozontal seperation properties of the strut brace. It will not prevent "racking" of the towers however. At any rate the brace is aimed to minimise rather than eliminate them.
There are no nuts under the plates, it is slightly raised due to the smaller stock reinforcement plates already welded to the top of the tower, I am still thinking my way around this one...
I am not worried about bending the plates etc, it is all high grade chrome-molly, something else will give first.

my idea of putting one on my l-series wagon was to stiffen the front end up a bit for on and offroad cornering....


thanks

wrx_nut