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Is that an old strut brace painted gold or the new ones Racing Beat are selling come in gold? It can be tricky when installing them, was this just a "fit-check" and you will be taking it back off until your done with everything else? I have had one of the old Racing Beat strut braces on my car for close to thirty years and have taken it off a handful of times. When you go to install the hood latch and strut brace remove the four bolts for the latch and shock tower bolts, start the four latch bolts a handful of turns leaving some slack, Then you should be able to hand thread the strut tower screws in individualy working the brace around you should be able to get all four bolts on each side started. Run them all the way down by hand, but do not tighten them, then adjust and tighnten the latch bolts followed by the tower bolts. Now this works with the old strut brace but if Racing Beat brought it back it should be close to the original design. Your picture reminded me of the first time I took mine off, when I went to install it I was unable to get one bolt to line up, once I backed everything back off and got all eight strut bolts started I was able to complete the installation. Hope this helps! One "oh by the way" I just thought of is you can also loosen the nuts on the aluminum mounting fixtures for some "additional" alighnment help when installing the brace too.
Last edited by Seniorchief; 04-28-24 at 06:07 PM.
Reason: forgot something
Replaced the original ignition coils
Replaced the spark plug wires with Magnacor 10mm
Replaced the Alternator & Air Pump belts
Installed the freshly rebuilt alternator (was still putting out 49 amps after 42 years, now puts out 65 amps and looks nice and new)
Is that an old strut brace painted gold or the new ones Racing Beat are selling come in gold?
This is a new one that is a pre-production unit. Meaning this one is built according to the old drawing tolerances with no changes. They will be changing a few things around, tolerance wise, for the production units. I was able to get all the passenger bolts to line up when firewall bolts were finger tight and all the casting nuts loose. The driver's side was about half a diameter off from lining up. I used a pry bar to get things to line up for the fit check and then ended up stripping the soft casting material threads on the passenger side. Adding helicoils to help prevent that in the future shortly. Next thing to try is to let the car back onto the tires to have the vehicle weight on those and then bolt up the castings to align the stiffening ribs on my 84 shock tower to see if the holes can be made to line up with the ribs lined up. This fit was with the vehicle on jack stands... thinking the front may have relaxed down over the years of hanging off unsupported. I want this to be easy to install and remove so the first alignment is not a nightmare when they have to push the struts down to rotate. I have a bunch of pics if anyone is curious.
Edit: It looks like you have the same amount of 2-4 threads exposed on the nuts that are holding the castings down. I'm not sure how the stack is doing that. The nuts installed normally with the casting over it, the stud is long enough, add the casting under the nut and now it's 3-4 threads too short? I'm loosing length somewhere... another reason to do this on the ground with the struts loaded.
fyi, this was the misalignment of the drivers side with the passenger and firewall finger tight . Going to play a few games before drilling out the holes.
Put the car on the ground before you start drilling out holes and making things worse. This brace was purchased over 25 years ago and was an easy fit on both an 80LS and my current 84SE. If your new production version is built to the same dimensions, your issue is with the frame being tweaked from being up on Jack stands...
Put the car on the ground before you start drilling out holes and making things worse. This brace was purchased over 25 years ago and was an easy fit on both an 80LS and my current 84SE. If your new production version is built to the same dimensions, your issue is with the frame being tweaked from being up on Jack stands...
100% agree with you that jacking the cars up moves the frame , when I jack my car up my hood will NOT unlatch .
frog arms/strong arms. I wonder if those could be adapted to work with our car. I have my fenders off now, can look into building my own out of square stock if similar mounting points exist.
I've been going through and cleaning off the corrosion on all the body electrical grounds. The Ei ground under the radio, Er ground on the hatch latch bolt, Ef grounds next to the passenger side headlight, and the midground on driver side strut tower.
I had some trouble finding the last Ef ground located behind the dash, I'm pretty sure it's this stud/nut behind the instrument cluster since there's a ring terminal on it, just wanted to confirm if anyone else has worked on that wiring before that this is it.
After a too-long Wisconsin winter I was finally able to get my car out of Hibernation. Had some time to do a few updates - added a momo wheel and a jdm 5 speed rx8 shift ****.
Did a bunch of stuff to the rear axle as noted in another thread, and it totally fixed the diff chatter (changed from Valvoline VV820 70W90 + extra CRC friction modifier to Lucas 80W90 + extra 4 Oz friction modifier from Mazdatrix).
And also just some little things. I "adjusted" the driver's side window frame inward by about 1/8". Despite the perfectly fine door seal weather stripping, I had some wind noise at highway speed. I noticed that if I pulled the window frame tighter inward the noise stopped. I also compared the gap between the window frame and the body on the driver's side to the same on the quiet passenger side, finding it to be bigger on the driver side.
I also checked the door strike adjustment and that was fine. So I lowered the window, sat in the driver's seat with the door open, and pulled the frame inward firmly and progressively with two hands either side of the 90° and then the ~30° joint the same way. After a couple of pulls, the gaps match side to side and the wind noise is gone.
I also lubed the hinges and strike mechanism with WD40 Specialist Dry Lube (Teflon), no more creaks opening/closing.
j tso - Boy, those pics bring back last summer's work getting wiper back in operation!! Replacing the circuit's connectors was easy enough (for a friend who knew what was needed, that is). But things had deteriorated so far that the motor's worm gear got badly stripped when wiper got activated all by itself one hot day, producing a horrendous high-pitched noise. Local young fellow diagnosed the worm gear as reason for motor's failure and got it back to normal.
After a too-long Wisconsin winter I was finally able to get my car out of Hibernation. Had some time to do a few updates - added a momo wheel and a jdm 5 speed rx8 shift ****.
My radiator finally arrived so I got to test fit it. 3 bolts lined up and the 4th is almost there but I think it's easier for me to widen the hole on the radiator mount a little to make it fit. I'll give it another test fitting before I do that.
The shroud doesn't fit on the bottom right side so I was thinking of cutting it to make it fit (radiator is shorter than oem). However, being that the fan is really close, do I really need to install the shroud?
Thanks! I think it matches the car pretty well, especially with the dark spokes. I found a momo hub on Amazon (momo store). Was a little worried that they would send the correct one, but they did.
My radiator finally arrived so I got to test fit it. 3 bolts lined up and the 4th is almost there but I think it's easier for me to widen the hole on the radiator mount a little to make it fit. I'll give it another test fitting before I do that.
The shroud doesn't fit on the bottom right side so I was thinking of cutting it to make it fit (radiator is shorter than oem). However, being that the fan is really close, do I really need to install the shroud?
My radiator finally arrived so I got to test fit it. 3 bolts lined up and the 4th is almost there but I think it's easier for me to widen the hole on the radiator mount a little to make it fit. I'll give it another test fitting before I do that.
The shroud doesn't fit on the bottom right side so I was thinking of cutting it to make it fit (radiator is shorter than oem). However, being that the fan is really close, do I really need to install the shroud?
That’s the same one I bought for my 82 GSL…..Damn…I miss that car…😭
04-28-24, 05:54 PM
