Maximum Motorsports Caster/Camber Plates

Install took about three hours with basic hand tools. As advertised, they allow correction of the alignment after lowering the car and they get rid of the annoying clunk that these cars develope after the upper strut mounts wear out. Handling improved a little, steering response is better because the sloppy upper mount was replaced by a spherical bearing.

Overall they are worth every penny.

~Mike~

 

Good to hear. They are at the top of my "to get" list.

 

Made a disturbing discovery tonight. Our Ford Racing strut tower bar isn't compatible with the hardware supplied with the CC plate kit.

The strut tower bar uses slightly larger mounting holes than the holes the CC plates feed through in the strut towers themsevles. No doubt to account for Ford's perfect manufacturing tolerances

Anyway, the CC plate kit replaces the stock flanged hardware with a washer and nylock nut. The combination of the larger opening under the washer and the removal of the rubber strut mount caused the washer to deform over time and allow the inner half of the CC plate to vibrate. When I backed the car out of the driveway this evening I heard a loud *pop* from under the hood. Both of the inside nuts on the passenger strut tower had stripped out and the washers looked like funnels.

The stock flanged hardware held the strut tower brace in place for thousands of miles without incedent, these washers failed after about 150 miles of highway driving. Stock hardware is flanged, but not locking. MM hardware is locking, but the washers don't cut it. I need to call MM on Monday and let them know what happened, hopefully I can get my hands on some flanged nylock nuts before too long. Without a strut bar I see no need to worry as the washers make full contact on the strut tower.

Additionaly, this proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the car does benefit from a strut tower bar. When the bolts went, one wheel was in droop travel in a drain at the end of my driveway and the other was in bump travel up on the driveway itself. Frame twist, anybody? Might have to invest in an upgraded K-member brace, too.

~Mike~

 

Mike,

A couple of things... I don't think you're seeing frame twist so much as load forces in a vertical plane acting on the dramatically reduced contact area of the washers, which in the end are the load-bearing surfaces of the strut mount when used with the tower brace. If you were seeing frame twist, it would be in the longitudinal axis, and would have bent the studs, as they were unsupported in the area between the brace and the strut tower. Additionally, they would have wanted to shift side-to-side, and would have worn the paint away on the brace mounting plate.

Also, the strut-tower brace bar does NOTHING for torsional stress on the chassis. It is intended to prevent tower location rotation into and away from the vehicle centerline with respect to the lower control arm mount points, but will do nothing to prevent rotation of the front half of the chassis with respect to the rear half.

I agree that if you want to run the strut-tower brace, you should use either whiz nuts, larger and heavier washers, or a flanged nylock (if you can find them). Ideally, you would weld up the holes on the strut brace flange, and redrill them to fit your existing setup, though.


In the end, though, the S197 chassis is incredibly tight in terms of flex. The Steeda crew (at least I think it was them, it might have been Multimatic) described the current production chassis as being roughly as resistant to flex as a fully prepped S95 chassis, with subframe connectors, brace bars, AND A CAGE. It's interesting to note that the only "production" S197 that is supplied with a strut-tower brace is the Shelby GT. NOT the GT500, or the Steeda Q525, or the Roush Stage 3, not the Saleen cars, AND, worth special note, NOT THE FR500C cup car! In the end, if you really want to minimize your chassis flex, a cage is the way to go, along with seam-welding.

 

Umm, maybe a bit confused here, the SGT leaves the factor as a regular production GT, w/ no strut tower brace, the GT500 leaves the factory w/a factory-installed strut tower brace, so at some power level, the engineers decided that it was either needed or just cool.

 

From the Shelby website...

"The balanced package includes a Ford Racing Handling Pack with special-tuned dampers, unique sway bars and a 3.55:1 ratio rear axle assembly for improved off-the-line acceleration. The overall ride height was dropped to reduce body roll while a front strut-tower brace adds additional strength to the chassis structure."

But you're right about the brace in the GT500... I still say it's cosmetic and not functional, or the serious race builders (Multimatic for one) would be running them...

 

If the chassis is so stiff, why did the strut towers move enough away from their origional location to break two nuts at the same time? Maybe frame twist was the wrong word for what happened if you got all technical, but there was flex somewhere in there that cause something to snap.

It'd be awfully hypocritical of Steeda to say that a strut tower bar isn't necessary and then turn around and offer several different designs to the public, too.

Keep in mind the car is a convertible.

~Mikr~

 

Mike, I am going out on a limb here, but based on your description of the washers being deformed due to lack of support below them (I'm guessing that they became somewhat funnel-shaped), it would indicate that the movement was in the vertical, not lateral plane. The fractions of a millimeter of movement that sucked the washer into the larger hole in the strut tower brace allowed a little more, now that the washer was deformed, and that eventually led to the nut popping off. If the motion had been in the lateral plane (side to side, viewed from the front), I would have expected at a minimum the washers to rub the paint off the strut tower bracket for the brace due to movement, and most likely the failure would have been the stud itself breaking from an impact with the brace, and not a deformation of the washer.

All I'm really saying is that I don't have any hard evidence (measured, not anecdotal) that indicates that strut tower braces or subframe connectors have any benefit for our chassis. Do they look cool? Absolutely. Are they particularly functional? I sincerely doubt it.

 

I get what you're saying about the two types of movement. I can't really tell how much paint was rubbed off anywhere because the deformed washers pretty much tore all the paint off in that general area of the brace. There was paint rubbed off under the bar where it had freedom to move around once the bolts had snapped, though. That damage wasn't there after we removed the bar to install the plates, but it's pretty clear that once the bolts let go the bar and strut tower were sliding across one another from left to right.

~Mike~