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| Rear Strut Tower Brace |
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Alllllllllllright...well, installing the Twistec Rear Strut Tower Brace was a much bigger pain in the ass than I thought it would be, but I learned a couple things. But starting from the beginning.....First, you have to pulldown the back seats like you would if you were loading lumber into the trunk or something. Then, you have to pull out all the little pop pin things that connect the fabric of the rear deck to the metal supporting structure underneath. There were four of these pins in my car. To remove them, just pry them out a bit and then pull straight out. They look like this when they're out, and like this when you're stupid and have monkey ass hands that fucking break everything you touch.
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After you have all the pins out, pretty much just pull the rear deck material until it pops out of place. It's in there pretty fucking good, and on the sides it is held in by two metal pieces that you have to really tug on to get them to pop out of place. Whatever, just fucking pull till it comes out. You can see the rear deck as it looks without the cover. The cover is what's leaning up against it in the left portion of the picture. The tops of the rear struts are located at either corner of the rear deck, as shown here.
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Once you have the rear deck stripped, now you must attach the strut bar supports to the struts. You can see in the picture how it's supposed to look when it's in place. How-thefuck-ever, either Saturn or Twistec erred in the production of their products, cuz it DIDN'T FIT. So, to get the supports to seat properly, I took my handy dremel and, using the cutting wheel, ground out some holes in the metal of the deck where the supports ran into it. Here is what the holes looked like when everything fit together relatively well. Yes, I had to do the same thing on each side.
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Now, one would think that once one has the supports bolted down, all one must do is to screw the eyebolts into the proper positions on the bar and then bolt it all up. This assumption would be true, except for the fact that TWISTEC AGAIN FUCKED THEIR SHIT UP. With the eyebolts screwed allll the way down into the bar, making the effective bar length as short as possible, it still was too goddamn long for the distance between the struts. As usual, out comes the dremel. After debating my options, I decided to cut the bolts in order to get the to screw further down into the bar. I cut off about 1/4" of one bolt and about 3/8" on the other. The offending tips are shown here. Finally, the fucking bar fit perfectly, as you can see to the right. To complete the install, you have to cut a couple slits in an "I" shape into the rear deck so the fabric is able to slide back over the strut bar supports. The "I" shape slits make the final product much cleaner looking, since the fabric just folds up against the supports, as opposed to cutting a rectangle out of the rear deck fabric, which would probably leave too much slack space. Either way, I'm not putting the deck back on for a few days, since I'm gonna be installing my springs within the week, necessitating access to the rear struts. Maybe I'll put an update up later...but probably not. Have fun, ladies.
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