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This would also make this most critical mounting point for the brace much stronger to have a sandwich plate clamping it in place versus the point load from two small flange nuts. To us, this is the only real weak spot of the design.
Don't get us wrong, this brace is very effective, but this would be an easy way to make it a lot better, easier to install, and we would be willing to pay more for a feature like this.
You can also see how it still allows the use of the stock fender brace, which adds additional stiffness by doubling and offsetting the load paths in this area. This is sort of like the principal of a box being a lot stiffer than a sheet of cardboard.
The next step, reassembling the car was the most difficult and the part that required two people. Our car is in good shape and has nice paint, so we did not want to chip and scratch stuff. Carefully realigning the doors is critical. A little off and the door can clash into the door jambs and fenders, causing damage.
A little off and the windows won't seal right, causing water leaks and wind noise. Uneven gaps also look bad and make your car look like it has poorly repaired body damage. Even though we were careful in trying to keep the doors aligned by shimming them and holding them in place when loosening the hinge bolts, they still shifted quite a bit and required two people to carefully realign them.
Keeping track of the witness marks left by bolts and the hinges themselves helped but reinstalling the doors still was careful trial and error to get things perfect. The same thing with the fenders. STI fenders are lightweight and flimsy and seemed to be under tension when installed at the factory. When removed, they popped into a slightly new shape, which made reinstalling them perfectly a little difficult to make sure the gaps were even, and not hit the hood or doors. It's not super hard, just care needs to be taken or you could scratch and dent stuff- or end up with a crappy looking car with uneven crooked gaps.
Surprisingly, we did not have these issues when working on the EVO. Perhaps the Subaru which has many more miles on the chassis had settled more over the years, putting some preload on the body parts.
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 🙁