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Originally Posted by JackG
Overall the brace kit looks fairly well made, but the brackets that bolt to the struts seem a little wimpy. They are flat plates with welded-in studs for the spherical joints to bolt on. The joints fit over the threaded portion, then just wedges onto the unthreaded portion. It then sits about 1/2 - 3/4 inch above the plate, which seems to give the stud a chance to exert a good bit of force on the plate, possibly flexing or ultimately cracking/breaking the weld. Maybe not, but time will tell.
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Unfortunately I've seen this sort of problem on many strut tower bars out there. Many of them are not engineered properly and will do nothing to prevent flex.
I've also kind of fallen off the strut tower brace bandwagon. There really doesn't seem to be that much bang-for-the-buck in most of the cars that I've played with this on, but perhaps the boxster is different.
Take for instance my eclipse. We removed the strut tower bar and then did some flex comparisons. We jacked up each corner of the car and measured deflection of the rear hatch area, front engine compartment and cabin. In stock form there was very little flex at all. Adding bars in did little to alleviate what little flex we had measured.
The only real way to strengthen a car's structure is to brace the chassis with a roll cage which of course, is a little invasive. Reedy little bars tacked to the strut towers just don't do as much as they're touted to do, no matter what the butt tries to tell you when you're driving.
Strut tower bars will tie the two sides together but they'll still deflect and since the bar isn't braced in a plane (in most cases--sometimes you'll see the ones that also connect to the firewall) it'll still shift front to back.
Again, I don't know--perhaps the Boxster is different, but then the age old argument for this sort of statement is the following:
If all it took to radically transform the handling of your car for the better was to connect a bar across the top of the strut towers, why didn't Porsche do it themselves?
If the improvements are repeatable and demonstrable, you'd think Porsche would take heed. At the very least I'd expect to see it as an option.