[manxman]

Disclaimer: The following is provided as a GUIDE ONLY, and neither myself, nor FITFREAK.NET endorse, recommend, encourage nor take any responsibility for the outcome of someone else doing the following. You follow these steps at your own risk!

When thinking about handling modifications, we should remember that we already HAVE a car with exceptional handling. Driving your new Fit home from the dealer, you already have the ability to beat any new Corvette on a slalom course. There is no such thing as "perfection", but there is nothing wrong with making a good car better. As long as the mods you buy are of good quality.

While waiting the 6-8 weeks for my Progress Technology Rear Anti-Sway Bar to be made and shipped, I decided that I probably should add at least a front strut tower bar to "balance" the handling of my Fit. Now, I don't really KNOW that a front strut bar is necessary or beneficial, because it is hard to imagine that the front struts flop around like a limp wrist.

The car's body is a long, rectangular tube, and the only structural bulkhead that keeps the sides of the body at 90 degrees to the floor and roof is the firewall, so it has to be really strong. Just a few inches in front of the firewall are the strut towers. How weak and flexible can they be?? However, an incident with one of my previous vehicles lends some support to the idea that added rigidity between the strut towers might be helpful.

My wife used to drive a 1990 Dodge Caravan minivan with strut suspension in front. We live in the mountains with a LOT of twists and turns in every road we travel. Our minivan would make sounds under the dashboard, on every tight turn, like someone was squeezing and releasing an empty beer can. Annoying as hell. I pulled up the carpet under the dash and found several cracks running across the center of the firewall! So I went to a wrecking yard and paid to have a section of about 1 1/2 sq. feet of a firewall cut out of a Dodge Caravan, brought it home and welded up the cracks in it, then put it over our own firewall and spot welded the reinforcement in place. No more noise.

So, assuming that a front bar may not be NECESSARY but may help, whose bar should I buy? Not the really cheap junk for $40.00 on Ebay. But not necessarily the $300.00 Mugen bar made entirely of stainless steel. I asked our members for advice on front strut bars and got absolutely no replies, but decided to go with a bar made of 6061 T-6 aluminum rather than any other material. This aluminum alloy is used to make thousands of parts for military and commercial aircraft, including some landing gear components, because of its corrosion resistance and extremely high strength-to-weight ratio.

In the $100.00 or less price range, we have the bar from Tanabe, who stresses that their bar is best because it is "adjustable for pre-load" on the strut towers, and stresses that you must raise the front wheels off the ground to relieve the weight on the strut towers for the installation. We also have the front bar from A Spec, who told me that their bar mounts the same way as Tanabe, is also made of 6061 T-6, but costs $25.00 less. So I bought from fellow Californians. I was disappointed in the overall quality of the A Spec product, and e-mailed them with my opinion and suggestions for improvement. No reply from A Spec They do not provide installation instructions. Maybe this article will embarrass them enough to make the necessary corrections in quality.

THE REVIEW:

The A Spec bar itself is OK. It appears to be solid (the Tanabe is hollow with what looks like RTV rubber filling the interior (good? bad? ??). The A Spec tower mounting brackets are big, heavy, "clunky" steel weldments with a rough, grit-blasted finish under the black paint. If I were making this product, I would have made the tower brackets out of aluminum as well, not painted steel. The brackets rest directly on top of the painted sheet metal strut towers. If there really IS movement of the towers, I believe that the rough surface of the steel brackets will abrade away the body paint and cause rust eventually.

The A Spec attaching hardware (nuts, bolts, washers) are PURE JUNK and should be thrown away. They supply steel, metric, socket head cap screws, zinc plated tiny washers, and zinc plated hex nuts with no lock washers. The bolts are steel with only enough black oxide coating to keep them from rusting while in stock, waiting to ship. They are GUARANTEED to rust on your car. The design of the brackets and their attaching bolts is POOR. The bolt holes are only about 1 millimeter smaller than the diameter of the cap screw heads. If you could tighten the nuts under the fender enough, you could actually pull the bolt heads THROUGH the holes in the brackets. At best, you get a weak "friction fit" to keep the bolt heads from pulling through. What you also get is enough scuffing of the paint in the bolt holes to start rust IMMEDIATELY. (See photos below).

CLICK ON THE PHOTOS TO SEE LARGER IMAGES. (I apologize for the poor quality of some photos- forgot to set my camera for "macro: focus for close-ups).


This installation DIY is actually a RE-INSTALLATION, because of severe rust that was evident after the bar had only been on the car for one month. One rain storm, two car washes. Here you see the installed bar before re-installation starts.


Here is the rust on the mounting bolts, and around the bolt holes in the brackets. This is the passenger side with the windshield washer hose.

When you get your strut bar, throw away the provided nuts, bolts, and washers. Go to either a hardware store (like Ace) or better yet if you have one in town, an industrial fastener supply company. At a hardware store, buy the following: stainless steel flat head machine screws, either phillips drive or hex drive if you can find them- either 1/4-20 or (bettter) 1/4-28. You need 4, 1" length, and 2, 1/2" length. Get 4, 1"o.d. X 1/4 stainless steel fender washers, and 6 "aero" or "Nylock" 1/4" nuts, either coarse or fine thread to match the bolts. The A Spec nuts & bolts provided are 6 mm, which is the same as 1/4" SAE.

Start your installation by prying out the plastic plugs that anchor the black plastic facia (against the upper firewall) to the inboard area of the strut towers, and pry out the plastic clip holding the windshield washer hose on the passenger side, and the clip that holds the wire loom on the driver's side. Leave the clips on the hose and the wire cable, but you will need the holes where they came from for your bolts.


This shows the provided hardware compared to the stainless steel hardware store stuff. The washers and nuts are attached under your fenders and there WILL be considerable vibration on the nuts if there is any movement of the strut towers that is being prevented by the addition of the strut bar. Because of this vibration, YOU NEED LOCKING NUTS, AND YOU NEED LARGE FENDER WASHERS to spread the clamping force of the nuts and bolts over a larger area under the sheet metal of your fender.


Because of the rust already there, and to prevent it in the future, I masked the bolt holes in the brackets and coated these areas with areosol rubberized undercoat spray, available from any auto parts store in the paint section.



Here's a top and side view of the stainless steel bolts placed in the bracket holes.


I was concerned about preventing paint abrasion and the propagation of rust from the steel bracket to the strut tower sheet metal, so I placed rubber washers used in garden hose fittings, over each bolt hole in the towers, and set the brackets over the rubber washers. The clamping force of the nuts & bolts flattens the rubber washers, but they still prevent contact of the underside of the brackets against the painted body sheet metal.

On the passenger side, place the inboard end of the bracket over the lip of the plastic facia, and put the bolt through the bracket and the hole in the facia lip. You won't need a rubber washer or gasket material under this end of the bracket because the facia insulates it here. On the driver's side, you either have to cut the facia to make room for the bracket (facia is a different shape here), or, as I did, you can place the bracket end UNDER the facia, with a rubber washer under the bracket, and bolt through the facia, bracket, and sheet metal. The INBOARD bolt holes are in a small "finger" of sheet metal that sticks out from the tops of the strut towers. The two OUTBOARD bolt holes go through the strut towers and under the fenders.


Here's a tip for easy installation- put a strip of masking tape (or Scotch tape) over the two fender washers for each side. You will be placing a washer and a nut underneath the fender, inside the strut tower, beside the spring, and there is ALMOST NO ROOM FOR YOUR HAND. Once you bolts are in place, push the taped side of each washer over the threaded bolt and it will stay there without falling off while you thread on the lock nuts.


See? NO ROOM, and this is the easy to reach bolt. The other one is invisible and you have to do things by feel. If you have one, use a ratcheting box wrench (7/16" or 11 mm) to tighten the nuts. Trying to get things tight by turning the phillips drive bolt heads will just screw up the bolt heads. Hex drive heads are better but harder to find.



So, your brackets are mounted as tightly as you can get them, and you have isolated the underside of the rough bracket from the painted strut towers with either rubber washers over the bolt holes, or some kind of rubber gasket sheet material to prevent scuffing and rust.

Now you have to adjust the threaded eye bolts on the ends of the bar so that the holes match up with the holes in the end brackets. You have to be careful to match up the holes exactly. The hex shape machined on the inboard side of the eye bolt prevents proper fit if you are off only 1/2 turn of either of the eye bolts. The hex rests right against the vertical sides of the bracket.



Once you get a good visual alignment of the holes, start to gently thread the bolts through the holes. You will need the proper size of Allen wrench to do this. The fit of the first bolt is easy, but the fit of the second one is hard and you will have to be careful not to screw up the bolt threads by using too much pressure forcing the aluminum bolt through the steel bracket sides. Once the bolts are in, screw on the provided aluminum lock nuts and tighten with an open end or box wrench and the Allen wrench.


Last of all, use black zip ties to fasten the hose and wire loom to the end brackets. Put the zip tie through the plastic clip that used to hold the hose to the tower-- do not put the zip tie around the hose itself or you won't get any washer fluid to the washer nozzles.

The Tanabe and A Spec bars are inexpensive, but I think that if ANY bar is really effective, stainless steel, Titanium, or 6061 T-6 aluminum bars will all work the same. I e-mailed Tanabe and their dealer who advertises on this forum, and asked how the pre-load adjustment they speak of in their ads is done, and asked what kind of attaching hardware they supply. NO ANSWER from anybody.

One of our members, fit4kris, bought the Tanabe bar. I hope that he can share his experience in installing it with us when he gets around to it.

I suspect that there is NO ADJUSTMENT POSSIBLE for these bars except the adjustment necessary to get the bar mounted in the first place. By lifting the car off its wheels, the gravity on the suspension will probably cause the upper ends of the strut towers to "sag" ,almost immeasurably, somewhere. Probably outboard. When you attach your bar to the towers, if the bar does ANYTHING, it keeps the towers from "sagging" back to where they started from, when you lower the car back to the ground. Once the bar is fully installed, you cannot make it any longer or shorter, so there is no "pre-load" adjustment possible other than the effect of weight and gravity bearing against whatever extra rigidity is provided by the bar.

The only change that I could see after this bar was installed was just a little more road noise from the front end. Maybe that means that it is doing something. I can't say that I felt any real change in the handling, but I have not done any serously hard driving since the installation.

By comparison, the improvement from the installation of the Progress Tech. Rear Anti-Sway Bar was immediate, like night and day.