Shoptalkforums.com

hey guys, was pondering fabbing up a Kafer Cup style bar for the rear tieing the rear shock towers together and tie them to the frame horns to make things a bit more rigid and got to thinking about the front... has anyone used the same sort of bar to tie the front shock towers together? Obviously the bar would have to go through the trunk or some creative bends under the gas tank but anyone used something like this and gotten any benitfits, do the front towers flex enough under hard cornering that this would be benificial, it almost sounds like it might increase understeer alittle? which not nessasarily a good thing, but looking for solutions to make the front end bulletproof. Just kinda thinking out loud

I assume you're talking about a Standard Beetle, since tying the strut towers together on a Super isn't anything new.
If the shock towers were actually carrying any of the vehicle weight, as they would with coil-overs or airbags, it'd be worthwhile to consider adding some sort of reinforcement (at least some diagonal bracing to the top tube like Thing beams have) but I don't think there'd be any noticeable benefit otherwise.

yeah I was talking about the reg. beetle. As for the bracing, yeah I wasn't quite sure if there would be any benifits, but I figured Ide ask cause you never know someone might have had some muraculus story of great surprising improvements it made or something, you never know Like I said jsut thinking out loud

What we used to do on circletrack cars was to clamp the beam in place further outboard to stiffen it up - fine if you have a tube-chassis but impractical with the stock frame head. Also the shock towers were tied into the tube-frame (I used ¼" Grade 8 bolts that were brittle enough to snap in the event of the front bumper taking a major shot, so the beam wouldn't get bent by it). Sometimes the top of the towers would be cut off completely to allow more clearance for coil-overs mounted to the tubing. In restricted classes where such modifications weren't allowed we were limited to 7" DOT-legal tires rather than 10" slicks and the engines were much weaker so cornering forces were far lower - but still a lot more than you'd normally see in street use (plus there was often a lot of wheel-to-wheel contact) and I never saw any problems - the Standard Beetle front end is a pretty stout unit in stock form.

Check out www.heigo.de and look through the 1200 VW expensive cages. There is a prettly slick brace that runs from the top of the shock mount to cage.

NICE