Info on strut bar contruction:
http://www.rogueengineering.com/Merc...&Category_Code

After reading this, now I know why certain strut bars cost more and the ones sold on Ebay can cost $10.

 

I'll stick with my $20 ebay one. I'd rather have one that can flex a tiny bit and saves me a couple hundred dollars.

 

+1 me too. For the way I drive, a strut bar is a strut bar.

 

Well you could Save $20 bucks and just not get one!

Good luck with your cheap FSTB! Hope it saves you a few bucks.

 

Cool link. This info is what I contribute in strut tower bar threads. This is exactly why I have a Cattman strut tower bar, it has the hinge style. See sig.

 

that is some good in-depth stuff!

 

Personally, I wouldn't pay $400-600 for a strut bar.
However, if contructed properly, it's worth the $100-200 price.

For the 6th gen, I was hoping Taz would use steel instead of aluminum.
If it's down to manufacturing cost, I'm sure most of us wouldn't mind
absorbing the cost after knowing the facts.

 

A piece of 1" thick aluminum (ebay bar) is more then enough strength to stabalize the strut towers of any unibody vehicle.

The only benefit of an expensive strut bar is looks. You guys believe to much of the crap you read on the internet.

 

To me it has the feel of "why you should buy our product". Propaganda mumbo jumbo.

 

My thoughts exactly. Although what they say is fact and proven that a hinge-style joint is better, and CF is a better material.... the cost does not in any way outweigh the benefits of those components/ construction of a generic ebay strut bar.

~95% of the people on maxima.org do not drive their cars on the high extreme in which these differences will be noticeable. I had an Aerospeed strut bar when I had the 3.0 in the car and worked perfectly fine. Cost me $45. For me to pay ANYTHING over $100 for a simple strut bar is ridiculous.

 

/thread

 

what a load of crap. You all do realize that the strut bar (at least for the maxima) is the single least effective suspension/frame-related mod you can do, right?

It ranks behind:
1. sway bars
2. lower tie bars
3. springs
4. struts
5. SFCs
6. poly bushings
7. every other suspension upgrade
8. every other frame stiffening upgrade

On the maxima, the strut bar has only a small effect on the car's handling. It's mainly a cosmetic piece for your engine bay. Sure it has a small effect, but not enough to justify any difference between a $20 strut bar and a $200 bar.....

For the negligible effect, a strut bar is a strut bar is a strut bar.

 

When will people learn not to belive everything that a manufacture's claims are true and that you need to get your info from a 3rd party source.

 

ding - winnar


All that crap sounds great until you come to the realization that A) that is the site of someone trying to sell carbon fiber strut bars and B) strut bars do very little anyways. I'll stick with my free one as well.

BTW the person who manages that site should proof read what they put on the internet when trying to sell products which they claim to be superior in some way - there are a ton of typographical errors on that page.

 

they also claim that a hollow carbon fiber tube has less compression under load than steel or aluminum, IIRC. Laughable.

 

for those who believe this stuff, you'll also want to check out this convincing, professional-looking site that sells total junk.

http://www.turbonator.com/WhatIsIt.html

 

Don't laugh, its true! Carbon fiber's tensile strength is about 5650 MPa vs high tensile steel at 1860 MPa, let alone aluminum at 440 MPa or so. I got these figures from Wikipedia, but don't laugh, they are pretty much on the money.

With a carbon fiber strut bar, the strut bar bar will break before it bend. The metals have a yield strength factor, while carbon fiber does not.

While I disagree with your quoted statement, I do agree that that for the price, you can find much more useful suspension upgrades. I wouldn't pay more than $40 CDN for a strut bar, unless I was seriously tracking a car. Then, I would get one that ties into the firewall, after stiffening the chassis.

 

1. what's funny is that many companies use CF in place of aluminum or steel BECAUSE of its flexibility and vibration damping properties. It is flexible AND strong. i.e. look at the CF forks and seatposts on many road and mountain bikes... It's put there to absorb road vibrations that would otherwise be transmitted to the rider in the case of steel or aluminum construction. Now that of course depends on the weave, thickness, and design of the CF part, but just because it's got a greater tensile strength doesn't mean it's always giong to be better than aluminum or steel.

2. another funny thing is this guy is giving aluminum and steel crap about thermal expansion...

so let's do some REAL math here, using this guy's own explanations.

coefficient of thermal expansion for aluminum is around 13e-6/ deg F
So let's assume it's 40deg F outside and the underhood temps are the 200F those guys talked about. That's a 160F temp swing.
also assume the bar is 36" long.

13e-6/F * 36" * 160F = 0.075" that's just a hair over 1/16".

What's that mean in the real world? moving the strut towers 1/32" each, that translates to approx 0.075 degree of positive camber gain.

think of how much change in camber you get by the flex in the suspension bushings just by leaning on the car. This number might as well be zero.


3. the guy is selling parts for BMWs- arguably the best-balanced cars on the road.. And one of the first things he mentions is that rear bars don't do anything.
Let's go back to that engineering stuff the guy tries to talk about elsewhere in the article.
the stock weight distribution on an E46 M3 is 51/49 f/r.

His words: "Since the rear suspension points do not see the same kinds of forces during hard corner (when compared to the front), a rear bar is typically unnecessary in a street application."

Now I'm no expert on mechanical engineering here, but let's think about things....
It's got nearly a 50/50 weight distro in static form... but remember the car is accelerating through the corner (as any good driver should do), so it's got more weight shifted to the back.
Remember it's also RWD with quite a bit of power. with a *grab number* 3:1 final drive ratio and in 1:1 3rd gear, that >300+lb.ft. of torque multiplies into about 900ft-lb of torque applied at the rear wheels.


so you've got more weight on the rear AND the rear wheels are doing most of the work in pushing the car out of the corner.... This guy is right. they don't see anywhere near the same kinds of forces the front suspension sees. they see a whole lot more!!


4. the guy is knocking all the other designs about bends in the bars and such, yet look at ALL of his designs. the bar itself is straight, but those pretty CNC milled aluminum mounts have pretty dramatic angles in them as well. This means without those horrible pivots using heim joints or hinges in them, the center bar will have tangential stresses placed on it at both ends. In plain english, that means the ends are trying to bend the bar like a leaf spring, instead of allowing it to perform the function of resisting simple compression and tension forces. This increases fatigue and decreases overall life of the bar.





Of course, this is negating the design of the front and rear suspensions and pickup points and just using ballpark numbers, but even with those roundabout numbers, I've shot this guy's comments to the ground... You can see where I'm going with these items and where his "achievements" in his novel design make it no better than any other bar out there.


his poorly applied engineering statements and horrible grammar certainly do not entice me to buy his products either. I'll stick with my $29 Otto Racing bar, thanks.

 

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