“My Fiancée's” Miata: Part 9 – V8 Roadsters Cowl Stabilizer Braces, Sway Bar End Links and Track Test
Last winter, I was debating all the areas of improvement the Miata needed and first and foremost was chassis rigidity. The car crashes over bumps, the interior rattles and the cowl shakes like an old man’s fist when the neighbor kids are playing ball too close to his roses. It was getting to me and really needed to be the focus for improvement before future modifications could be made. Much like a relationship, a chassis needs to be rock solid for the whole package to work. My fiancée will appreciate that part.
Only the best FEA software applies when it comes to planning chassis reinforcement on the Miata. The open top nature of this car, along with 20 years of abuse from mother nature, have created a floppy chassis. The rear third is well supported by the roll bar, but the front 2/3rds needs some help. If only a company designed a really good chassis brace that would match the blue dotted line in my drawing…I started doing mental gymnastics of the shortcomings of the chassis design of the Miata and quickly headed to the best design software money doesn’t have to buy, MS Paint. Looking at the chassis, the biggest area for improvement would be to connect the top of the window frame to the Blackbird roll bar, more or less making a coupe, but that’s not safely happening in a street car. I get enough grief about the roll bar clearance to my head already, I thought I better not add another bar in there to piss off more of our readers. If we imagine how forces are transmitted through the chassis, we can see that the roll bar does a good job tying in the rear chassis, but there was nothing up front to counteract the front suspension forces. Enter stage right, V8 Roadsters Cowl Stabilizer Braces.
V8 Roadsters Cowl Stabilizer Braces are a work of art and engineering. In this humble author's opinion, they are far and away the best design on the market for Miata's. Using sound engineering principles, V8 Roadsters brace connects the upper frame area, near the shock assembly mount, with the lower mounting bolts at the front of the door, one of the strongest areas of the Miata chassis.
Lovely details like this gusset help strengthen the main arm of the brace, while supporting for loads introduced perpendicularly to the bar via the arm that connects to the upper door mount.
This simple design helps transmit any movement efficiently to the main brace, as well as the chassis.
