EK Owners With Strut Bars
28-Dec-2004, 10:55 AM
#10
Registered User
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Toronto
Posts: 133
The purpose of strut bars, is to reduce flex that these towers experience during hard cornering. When taking a turn a cars strut towers normally flex, resulting body flex and losing some traction. Strut bars are designed to keep your strut towers from flexing, they distribute the pressure applied to one strut tower when taking a turn to both towers instead of just one. This keeps the wheels in position. Keeping the wheels in position helps keeping the tires in the desired position on the road, and this will help to improve traction on the turns. Rear strut tower bars are designed to work like the front bar by tying the two rear strut to work together, increasing the overall chassis stiffness. Rear strut bars minimize understeer due to less chassis flex and improves stability during corner braking. Strut bars work very well in conjunction with sway bars.
Now most people will not notice a different on Toronto street’s because you’re not doing any hard high speed cornering. Now like stayed above you get what you pay for. Buying a cheap strut bar will do more damage then good, or no improvements if it’s flexing. Cheap one’s usually are more for looks then performance. Try looking for a rigid strut bar that will not flex with little force (Comptech, Spoon, Mugen are all excellent example of some strut bars), but most people will not spend that amount on parts if they can get one for 1/10th of the price.
Like sway bars, why buy a new $500 Comptech Sway/Tie bar when you can get one for $100 (best sway bar on the market today for a civic in my opinion, give's you extra sub frame reinforcement with the large tie bar). Well big sway bars (22mm +) will improve your suspension greatly but for daily use on a civic are not recommend. It will rip out or crack you sub frame just by going over a speed bump diagonally or up your driveway in time. The civic sub frame’s are really weak thin steel. For something that could have cost you $500 dollars now cost you $200 on a new sub frame and almost $1000 on labor and some extra if you want to reinforce the new one with some steel plates so it will not happen again.
But hey, this is your car and your money so do what you please with it.
Now most people will not notice a different on Toronto street’s because you’re not doing any hard high speed cornering. Now like stayed above you get what you pay for. Buying a cheap strut bar will do more damage then good, or no improvements if it’s flexing. Cheap one’s usually are more for looks then performance. Try looking for a rigid strut bar that will not flex with little force (Comptech, Spoon, Mugen are all excellent example of some strut bars), but most people will not spend that amount on parts if they can get one for 1/10th of the price.
Like sway bars, why buy a new $500 Comptech Sway/Tie bar when you can get one for $100 (best sway bar on the market today for a civic in my opinion, give's you extra sub frame reinforcement with the large tie bar). Well big sway bars (22mm +) will improve your suspension greatly but for daily use on a civic are not recommend. It will rip out or crack you sub frame just by going over a speed bump diagonally or up your driveway in time. The civic sub frame’s are really weak thin steel. For something that could have cost you $500 dollars now cost you $200 on a new sub frame and almost $1000 on labor and some extra if you want to reinforce the new one with some steel plates so it will not happen again.
But hey, this is your car and your money so do what you please with it.
28-Dec-2004, 12:46 PM
#12
Registered User
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Toronto
Posts: 133
the OEM SIR and ITR are really good solid bars. I meant cheap meaning $50 ractive bars, or no names (mostly what you see selling on the for sale forum) plus a ITR bar will cost you about $100 each used, but the only thing i don't like about the ITR front bar is that it does not mount on the strut bolts unlike the spoons, neuspeed etc.
See what i mean, and i have seen a lot of civic's where it starts making the hole bigger and eventually gets loose and bends the bolds. And in some cases where the hole is so big you just pretty much can pull the bar out without unscrewing anything.
See what i mean, and i have seen a lot of civic's where it starts making the hole bigger and eventually gets loose and bends the bolds. And in some cases where the hole is so big you just pretty much can pull the bar out without unscrewing anything.
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