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Before loosening the door hinges, we attempted to shim it in place with these plastic wedges.
We were trying to keep the doors in alignment and to prevent the door from falling down and scratching the paint. It did help us to not scratch the paint, but the door still shifted and got out of alignment.
The door hinges bolts were removed while another person held the door in place.
Now, the Ultra Racing braces were bolted in place at the door hinge end. As you can see, the stock corner braces can be retained.
Now Howard can drill the holes for the front mounting point. Note how the braces extend all the way to the factory engineered in buckle points for crash force absorption without interfering with them. Hopefully, this means that the car's built in front crumple zone with function as planned.
To be able to install the nut inside the unibody, Howard used a long open end wrench and stuffed paper towel around the nut to hold it in the wrench while he threaded it into the chassis.
5 comments
Aww shit what happened to the old comments?! There was good data in the comments!!!
yeah sorry about that but as we transitioned to this new site it became clear that transferring the user accounts from the old site was a large and difficult undertaking. Since we didn’t bring the user accounts over, the comments couldn’t come with them either.
I know this is a slightly older wright up, but I wanted to point out that these braces were installed with the car on jackstands, this could have been the culprit for aligning the door as the chassis flexes a bit to where the jack stands are. Same reason why its typically common to weld in a roll cage when the car is sitting on leveled ground.
This is not the case in this car, maybe old cars. It’s just never easy to line up doors so you always have to be careful or you end up chipping the paint, etc.
It looks like Ultra Racing has discontinued these braces. In your research, were there any other braces like these that stood out as maybe equal to or at least 2nd place compared to these? I was literally about to order some for my 04 and saw the “Discontinued” sign 🙁