I saw a pic posted recently that showed a nice rear shock tower brace and can't seem to find it. Does anyone know who makes a bolt in brace? I'm getting some stress cracking in the sheetmetal near my passenger side shock tower and I want to look into reinforcing this area. Any help would be appreciated.

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Not needed.

Paul

Brad posted some pics earlier of how the cracking starts inside the tower pieces. What the fix is I imagine is to weld in a piece.

Geoff

even when there are stress cracks like he is experiencing? I'd say that would be one situation where one would help...??

a brace might help a bit in his case but it won't fix the problem.
i have yet to see a race-914 that needed one.

if the chassis cracks, the problem lies elsewhere.
there was a thread earlier where brad posted pics of where to strengthen that area.
fix the cracks, then reinforce the towers. forget about the brace ...

Andy

I wonder if it might be more helpful to extend your cage tubes back to the shock towers, and then possibly also weld a tube in between the shocks. I know this costs a point or two in POC (unless you have already run tubes thru the bulkheads). Once you've gone down that road, you could also triangulate the front strut towers, and also maybe reinforce the rear 'ears' area.

If your trunk is completely stock (meaning you didn't cut 1/2 of the sheet metal out like I did) you shouldn't need it. Where are your stress cracks? How bout a picture. The shock towers really don't do much work, the real stress is down in the trailing arm attachment area.

Paul

I'll see if I can shoot a pic that shows the area today. It's a tough spot to get a clean camera shot. It's on the engine side of the wheel well just forward of where the shock tower is. There is a diagonal joint in the sheet metal that is tack welded. My welds are broke and the sheet metal is separating slightly and a little wavy meaning it looks like it's been flexing. My trunk is stock. I've seen the pic of the L shaped bracket that goes in the inside corner of the shock tower to reinforce it, but I would need to remove some of the stock sheetmetal to open up that area if I'm not mistaken and I thought a cross and diagonal brace between the towers would help. I also considering a diagonal brace between the console ear and forward to the firewall. I ripped my trailing arm in half last season and reinforced them. Brad said this would transfer the stress to another area and it looks like he was right again.
Chris; I'm at the end of my points in V3 and don't want to venture into V2 yet so I'm not planning on extending my cage to the shock towers until it becomes apparent that I absolutly need to.

Your problem is not from flexing between the two shock towers

The rear trunk / engine compartment firewall is strong enuf to keep the two shock towers from flexing

It's because the crappy connection from the framerails to the shock towers

Look at the picture below... the firewall has been cut out and shows the crappy connection from the framerails to the shock towers (green arrow)

The spotwelded seam from the firewall (blue arrow) is supposed to take care of all the stress... and like you noticed, it won't do a very good job at that...

cheers,

Jeroen

Thanks for the pic Jeroen. I would like to reinforce this area with an L plate like you did. But I will need to cut out some of the rear firewall to gain access and than brace between the shock towers to replace the firewall that's been cut out, I think? Isn't that what was done to the car in the pic?

Hey Drew,

There is no L-plate welded in the pic... what you see is surface rust on the sheetmetal (which was never painted because it's sandwiched by the firewall)

The plan is to seam-weld the framerail to the shocktower and maybe weld in 2 horizontally positioned triangles to help spread the load

I did cut out the full rear trunk floor as well (check the link in my signature for more pics)

Other plans are to run braces from the tranny mount to the inner suspension ears
From the ears to the passenger comp firewall
From the center of the shock tower brace to the ears
Finally, the top of the main rollbar will be braced to the rear shock towers

That should tie everything together pretty well...

cheers,

Jeroen