Strut Brace, Part the Fourth
About two weeks ago, my strut brace adventure came to a (temporary) finish. I will now tell you about it.
The painting went well, and the braces look awesome. Remember, more pictures (and closeups) on my Flickr page, just click on the picture.
Looks good, no? Everything came out just like I wanted it to. The fruits of many hours of labor are there, ready to be installed. The front brace installed perfectly, which is good considering it was installed for many months before.
All that was left was to install the rear brace. So I braved 100°F weather working inside my trunk to get it in. Got the brace fitted in and then the brackets mounted. However, when I went to install the brace itself…
Massive, EPIC, fail. Seriously, I couldn’t believe what I had done when I realized there was no way to actually install the brace.
But it fit before! What I neglected to take into account was that the brace had to fit above the brackets in order to fit onto them, and above the brackets the walls of the trunk become closer together, preventing this from happening. So the brace cannot possibly be installed in the manner I had originally intended. However, all is not lost! I realized that the walls I was trying to attach to were not anywhere close to as structurally sound as I originally thought. Also, the strut towers themselves DO come into the trunk, and I completely missed them. So I will simply re-engineer my brace to fit onto the strut towers, which is what I wanted to attach them to anyway. However, this project is on hold until September, when it will be hopefully cooler. No more working in the blistering heat for me!
