By comparison, the Ronin Speedworks Front Mount Support Bridge greatly increases the rigidity, strength, and stiffness of the rear subframe, the chassis, and locates the front mounting point of the Ford Explorer 8.8” differential.
Before any welding can happen, we had to prep the subframe by grinding off the paint where the Mounting Support Bridge connects to it.
We also prepped the lower part of the subframe to install the optional reinforcement plates. According to Ronin Speedworks, this area flexes under heavy load and becomes the weakest link around 800-1,100whp. Despite having customers who drag race at this power level without failures, Ronin has seen the subframe tear in this area and now offers these reinforcement plates to strengthen and stiffen the subframe.
The majority of Ronin’s customers do not install these reinforcement plates because it takes a lot more time than simply welding in the support bridge. Since we had access to a fab shop and increasing the stiffness of the chassis is never a bad thing; we decided to install the reinforcement plates.
The reinforcement plates required some forming/bending to the shape of the subframe itself. This took the most time of the entire installation. Once we had the inner subframe reinforcement plate tacked in, we started on the outer subframe plate.
We ground off the paint of the outer subframe to prepare it for the reinforcement plate.
After forming the outer subframe reinforcement plate, we tacked it in place.
4 comments
This is vastly superior to any other 8.8 conversion I have seen for this car. Now to convince Jeff to do this to Project V8 FD!
We are spoiled to have so many updates on this amazing project lately! Keep up the hard work.
Great write-up and an impressive kit.
Although, it seems the support bridge could be easily revisioned to be at least half an inch lower so it wouldn’t necessitate beating up your pristine RX-7-s body.
Damn, great progress. 🙂
still loving the fact that this went from rest-mod to restless-mod.
been following from the beginning.