Do they make a differance to the car or is it just for looks.
Braces are all about looks mostly, there is no measureable performance gain (rear subframe braces excepted).
Cage it or leave it alone IMO.
Sorry, I don't agree with that entirely!
You can measure flex and rigidity with a 'creep guage' we use them at work on Typhoon when it comes to structural health monitoring.
This could gauge/calibrating tool could be used in a car if I could get some mounts adapted! I could test the x-brace on and off the car and this would prove on paper in black and White any slight differentiation in lateral rigidity!
And I garuntee the results would show positive structural effects
You can read and read all you want on a certain subject but until you try or test or put into practice it's just an opinion
The bolt-on chassis bracing mentioned in the first article was tested as well. The car has a front upper and rear lower bolt-on brace, and after the baseline test was complete they were disconnected and a few tests were run to see their effect. The braces had no effect on wheel rates in bounce and roll, and in the compliance tests the results were barely noticeable. The largest difference was in the lateral opposed test where cornering forces are applied in opposite directions on either side of the vehicle. In this test the rear brace showed a difference of a couple hundredths of a degree of camber per 1000 lb of cornering force, while the front indicated a very slight increase in stiffness with the brace removed. The bottom line is that these braces added weight and cost but provided no practical performance improvement.
Given the nature of the braces on this car, which bridge between two parts of the car without triangulating to a third point, it's not hard to imagine that their effectiveness would be minimal. But based on the number of personal accounts by people who have installed the bars and report huge increases in vehicle responsiveness and handling the only true way to determine the value of the bars is to do a back to back comparison on the K&C machine.
i have one, its good
At the end of the day the x brace stiffened my rear end dramatically, your connecting the c pillars to the suspension struts to 'reduce' not 'eliminate' lateral flex under load shift!
The lateral bars are useless when used with the x brace, you have already connected the c pillar to strut tops via the x brace which has a point of contact between all 4 ends.
I agree that tegiwa's products on the whole are pretty terrible TBH, but the matter of the fact is a strut brace is a strut brace at the end of the day, no matter the make they all do the same job.
pretty sure kozy is just moaning about the fact that the tegiwa copy has alot of pivot/flex points and not really a "true" brace. There is no doubt that it will work to an extent, just not to the same level as a weld in cage.
You're right, I don't. Since it appears you do in this case, then please accept my apologies, I am always pleased to be proved wrong.
What do you plan to test, the strength of the brace itself, or the movement between the mounting points without the brace? Will this be on an EK9 or an EK4?
By Typhoon, do you mean the jet fighter?