my ebay strut tower bar :P

[jtieo84]

Was bored and i'm broke, so i went ahead and bought one instead of spending 150-200 on more expensive ones.. figured it couldn't be too much of a difference figured i'd share with the broke mazda 3 owners out there hehe..

Made my suspension feel a tad more rigidity, but it could just be psychological.

 

[c.smock]

sumi did the same thing... and feels the same way...








yall are both crazy...lol jk looks good man..

 

[judman13]

Yay for another sucker that fall victim to a pointless hinged strut bar....

No offence but you did no good.

 

[c.smock]

to each his own sir...

GTFO!

 

[JOMO]

Wow, take it easy everyone. Dont have to be rude.

And to jtieo84, I know its tough sometimes to afford mods for a car. But in the long run you will be happy to just save up that little bit more and get the real deal. Looks good though.

 

[jtieo84]

well i'll be riding on coilovers soon so hopefully the bar though it may be hinged will prove useful. I know the solid welded strut tower bars are nice and all, but this still does help the the shock towers the proper distance from each other and will help with some flex in the chassis (if i even ever push my car to that extent lol, i drive like a grandma right now to save on gas)

 

[dmention7]

Yay for another sucker that fall victim to a pointless hinged strut bar....

No offence but you did no good.

The hinges won't make a lick of difference. The point of a strut bar is to maintain rigidity between the tops of the strut towers. In other words, it's providing rigidity along the axis of the bar. As long as the end plates are bolted securely to the strut towers, the forces at play could care less if there are hinges at the ends of the bars. In fact, many high end strut bars have hinges. And if you look at the ones that don't, it's quite obvious they aren't designed to be structurally rigid at that point.

 

[jtieo84]

^nice post, good to know^

 

[rustychops41]

I agree. Hinges don't make it any less effective. Either the strut tops are tied rigidly together or they aren't. No offense, but learn how to spell "offense."

 

[judman13]

Well thanks for the obvious backlashing. My bad for misspelling a word.

As for the hinged strut bars.
I researched and wrote this myself. So overlook any spelling or grammatical errors.

ok just think of your suspension as a trapezoid.

Now the top two corners (Red dots) on either side are where the struts mount to the car and the top line is the strut bar (blue line).
In a effort to keep things stiffer, people put strut bars to make sure they trapezoid stays in perfect shape thus reducing frame flex, body roll and overall rigidity.
Well with a hinged bar you are allowing those top two points to move up and down as well as flex left and right. The hinges do what hinges do best and that is permit movement.
The hinges allow each strut tower to move more free without translating much force to the other strut tower and wheel.
With a fixed bar, both towers are connected with a ridged bar that will transfer the forces acting upon it to the other tower. This will do the thing a strut bar is meant to do.
Just because a strut bar is bolted onto a expensive car or made of carbon fiber, it does not mean it is effective.

Copied from TuningLinx

On most applications, strut bars install in minutes and they look shiny and cool. However, looks have little to do with performance. To reduce the flex between struts, the setup should be as rigid as possible. In fact, real strut bars don't have joints and look like an "X", so go for it for a more rigid frame if you have time and money.

Hope this clears a few things up.

 

[dmention7]

While it's true that making that joint rigid would be better, a hinged strut bar is FAR from pointless. By tying the tops of the strut towers together, even with jointed ends, you are adding the top bar of your trapezoid there, which prevents the strut towers from flexing independantly. Tell me that's pointless, compared to not having that top bar there at all.

The fact that a given strut bar is not hinged does not mean there is no flex at the joints. The amount of flexing we are talking about is very small, and a given non-hinged strut bar likely allows almost as much flex as a hinged one. Trying to brace a rectangular shape using rigid corners is highly ineffective to begin with. The only real way to really prevent parallel flexing between the towers is to build an "X", as referenced in your quote. In other words, the top of one strut tower is tied to the bottom of the other.


In summary, sub-optimal <> pointless. An appropriate analogy would be adding a catback exhaust to a NA motor, instead of going turbo. One is an easy inexpensive bolt-on that gives a few ponies, the other is a major undertaking that gives much more dramatic gains.


Also, if it annoys you that you're being called out on semantics, then maybe consider making a useful informative post in the first place, instead of just firing off an insult followed by a passive-aggressive "no offense".

 

[rustychops41]

My bad on being the "spell check" nazi. If the hinges were as tall as the width of the brace, as in the graphic, it would in fact be useless. But then again, your strut tower brace would be up somewhere above the top of the windshield. A non-hinged brace may be ever-so slightly more effective than a hinged one, but then we can all get into just how effective STB's are at all for most street driven cars. It looks nice, and many budget mods are probably more pyschological than real. Now don't get us started on people putting rear STB's in their Protege sedans! LOL