strut tower supports?

[Guest comeandzpa]

I am considering installing a front strut brace on my 81 280ZX N/A, but I dont know if they are worth the cost. I would like one similar to the ones in MSA, but I dont want to pay that much. I have a friend who could probably weld one for me, but I would prefer a more professionally done job. Does anybody have any experience w/ these, and can anybody recommend a good manufacturer? Thanks

[Guest greimann]

One thing you might want to ask yourself is why do you think you need one? If it's for better handling, there are better "bang for the buck" modifications you should do first, namely: tires, struts / shocks and springs. Once you have those basics covered, then move on to chassis stiffening, which yields less performance per dollar than those other mods.

 

I went with strut tower stiffening because I could see that the hood gap was changing as a result of the torque from the V8. The handling improvement was a nice added benefit.

 

And while we are on the subject of strut bars, in my engineering opinion, the ones that tie the top of the towers together have a serious design flaw, and are put on the market because they are cheap to make and are easy to sell to an unsuspecting public. Reason this: If you want to control the movement of a structure because it is flexing would you tie it to another flexible piece of structure? Also, with the popular strut bars, you have just set up a 3 link mechanism, which allows the whole front end to parallelogram back and forth. Triangulation of any structure is the way to stiffen it and in the case of strut towers, tie them to a relatively solid piece of structure like the firewall. This is a more complex and expensive hardware solution, but certainly makes more sense from a structural point. There are some pictures of my ideas on my site below.