JMortensen

Since you're able to post, I would imagine that you are also able to reply. If you can't reply you're either replying to a thread in the Member's Projects section where nobody can reply except admins, or you're replying to a FAQ post, where your reply needs to be approved by an admin before it becomes public. The reason behind these limitations is that we don't want posts with bad/incorrect info in the FAQs, and we don't want the Member's Projects section to be interactive because we want to keep tech posts in the tech section.

Mike, I don't know why you'd post about your crash and share a video of you and your friends breaking the law and expect other people not to question you or what you did. Unlike most other car forums, most of the members here are a little older and have already sowed their wild oats, so appreciation for this type of thing might be a little harder to come by here. Regardless of your racing experience and the street racing subject which is always a touchy one, it's never a good idea to post video on the internet of you or your friends breaking the law.

I disagree with this. In my case I have some tall mounts, but the mounts are stout and boxed in (at least they are now) and they should be a hell of a lot stiffer than a bent thin wall tube. I think it's much more important to have the tube straight than the mount low. You can make the mount strong, but the tubing size is limited with hood/engine clearance, so I think that is the weak link. Keeping the weakest piece straight makes it much stronger in tension and compression.

You guys are sounding like you think that if you make a strut tower bar with heims that it won't work. It will, I can say that with a lot of confidence since I ran one for years, after not running one for years. The difference was amazing. The real issue is that it will let the strut towers raise or lower in relationship to each other without any resistance. But even a strut tower bar without heims isn't going to help much if at all with that problem. Take the same bar without heims isn't really all that great at stopping that up and down movement either, you're loading the bar in it's weakest direction. Think of it like a diving board. A diving board is very stiff if you were trying to pull the end straight out, but trying to prevent the end from moving up and down is not what it's good at. The strut tower bar is a long small diameter bar and as such doesn't require much force to deflect at the other end. Now in the rear where you can WELD IN A LARGER TUBE, there I think you have an argument. In my humble opinion the front bar should be there to prevent LATERAL movement of the strut towers. The triangulated bar to the firewall should be there to prevent FORE/AFT and LATERAL movement. They are not placed correctly to prevent up and down movement of the strut towers and should not be relied on to do so. That job is better handled by some bars from the rocker to the upper frame rail, or a cage that attaches through the firewall, preferably at a good angle to the strut tower, or an X in the radiator core support.

I found that on some of the steel that I have bought the mill scale actually clogs the flap disk on a grinder. For those pieces I use a knotted wire wheel. It has to be a newer wire wheel too, an older one won't do it. I hate mill scale...

shox.com is well known. If you pick one of the ebay sites that only does suspension and has hundreds or thousands of positive feedbacks with few or no negatives you're probably good to go. A debit card with a Visa logo gives you all the same fraud protection as a credit card. It's still a Visa.

There are some pics on his website: http://www.betamotorsports.com. If you go to the bench racing section and then to the OTC stuff, I think there are some pics there. Various other pics scattered around the site. It was a one off FI NA L31 with ~290whp, sequential trans, Penske shocks, etc. No expense spared, really fast Z car. He parted it out and sold the shell a couple years back.

I was only able to find one picture for the Comp Coupe strut tower brace. It's at the bottom of this page: http://www.caranddriver.com/specialtyfiles/8120/specialty-file-dodge-viper-competition-coupe.html I can't tell because the corners are cut off but it looks like it attaches to the roll bar, and not the cowl or anything else in the engine compartment. It also looks like the X is bent up to clear the intake. While it may be possible to do this differently in a Z, I still don't see a good place to attach it to, and the curve in the brace seems like it would be less stiff than a straight bar that goes through to the dash bar.

Cameron, I think I see the difference in our two cars. In this pic you see the support on the passenger side of the cowl. Mine did not have this vertical support underneath the cowl, although it did have one on the driver side. I think after all the discussion I'm going to go through the firewall to a dash bar. It just seems like the best most rigid solution.

Hmm... mine has no support on the passenger side. There is a vertical support on the driver side. Maybe yours is a later chassis and they put one in later on???

Did they engineer the mount with the software? I'm not questioning the mount... I'm questioning what it is mounted to. I've stitched my firewall to the cowl box and I'm bringing this up because of the flex in the firewall that I was feeling while removing paint with a scouring pad. I mean if I can flex it by hand (all sections, not just right at the top or right in the middle), that makes me think that when the strut towers try to deflect the mount won't have a chance...

Hey thanks for all the pictures. Does this bar bend or is it a straight shot? Any interference with the pedal box?

Looking for your thoughts and input. I am just about to paint the bottom of my car. My task list was: a. finish rear control arms b. mount fuel cell c. cut and weld rear fenders for flares, and then I figured I could paint the bottom. Those things are now done. I started to work in the front and ended up stripping the engine compartment, so I was thinking of painting it as well, and that's when I hit a snag. What to do about the strut tower bar??? I cut off the crappy firewall clevises I had a friend weld on during the previous build, although I still have the clevises on the strut towers. Now I'm considering cutting those off too, and redoing the whole thing completely. My original plan was to reuse the original clevises where they mounted to the firewall, but after looking at where they were welded to I've decided I'm definitely not going to do that. The driver's side clevis hit one of the cowl supports. I think I ASSumed that there would be another support on the other side, but there isn't. The passenger side wasn't attached to a reinforced area of the firewall at all. So now the issue is whether to use the existing clevises on the strut towers and attach them to a mount at the center of the firewall, or whether to integrate the triangulated brace into the cage itself. I'm really thinking that I should cut the clevises off of the strut towers as well, and integrate the clevis into the reinforced area that the cross bar bolts to. I think the original idea worked in a rudimentary way, but in retrospect really wasn't that great and could have been done a lot more cleanly. The major concern I have about doing something like John Coffey did with the mount in the center of the firewall is that the firewall really doesn't seem very sturdy. Even if the mount was fairly large and spread the load over the top and bottom sections of the cowl, it still doesn't seem like a very good spot. I was really excited about bjhines' solution of reinforcing the cowl structure, but now I'm not so sure that it's a good idea to attach anything to the firewall. Maybe if I ran a bar from the dash bar straight through the cowl to the firewall... seems like a PITA... The major concern I have with integrating the strut towers into the cage is that if I eventually get around to an engine swap I'd hate for those bars to be in the way and then to have to cut them out. If I did this I would triangulate from the strut towers to a dash bar, and the two bars would intersect at the dash bar and go straight through the cowl area. Some pics: WRONG strut tower attachment points!!! Don't put them here like I did! Blank slate: Bars through the cowl to intersect dash bar: Bars attach to firewall bracket in center: This is what the strut towers look like currently: This is how I would move the strut tower bar attachment point:

I was asking Pop.