coilovers

ramchargers

Grantelli makes 'em:

Motorsports makes 'em too: If you've got a strong caster/camber plate the front strut towers will be no problem. The issues I've seen with strut tower strength all start with a weak C/C plate that bends under load and concentrates the forces.

I've got the MM fronts on my '03. I love 'em. It's a really nice kit, well made, and very high quality.

Dan '03 Cobra convertible With some stuff on it

Thanks , we are planning magor chassis mods

I used to have MM CC plates on my '98 GT, until I personally SAW the results of a bottom-out condition that popped the spherical bearings right out of the shell, putting two holes through the hood. The driver was not amused.

On the OEM setup, extra parts prevent this sort of problem; these parts place the bottom-out forces on the strut tower where it belongs, not solely on the spherical bearing itself. If you study the MM design with an eye on bottoming-out conditions, you will quickly see how this can happen.

I would *never* use coilovers on a Mustang, as the strut towers were never designed for these kinds of loads. And after seeing those bearings pop out, I pulled my own MM's out, replacing them with OEM parts that will never suffer that kind of failure. And frankly, most street drivers install CC plates just for looks anyway; 99% of the time, all they're really good for is added camber adjustment which can be gained by simply elongating the strut tower slots in minutes with a small, round hand file.

-JD

Interesting. My experience is different. I have heard of incidents like yours but I have never seen one personally. Each of the cases that I do know of were the result of coil bind in hard corners. The coils bound up an put a higher load into the C/C plate/strut tower. One case was a repetative pot-hole on a road race course. The clear answer here is: choose a rate and spring length that avoids coil-bind.

On the other hand, I hang and have spoken with many people with thousands and thousands of miles on properly set up coil-overs and MM C/C plates. Many of these guys also have hundreds of hours on track and a few regularly race open road events. None have had a failure with the four bolt MM system and a couple of them run spring rates as high as 450 lb/in.

Your mileage obviously varies. I've come to trust the Griggs and Maximum Motorsports engineering. Both companies do an outstanding job and both have run cars for a long, long time with coil-overs and no issues. There will always be statistical failures, it happens. I personally have seen two failures of the stock plates with high rate springs in the stock perches that I'll call "quality anomolies".

If you want even more info go search the archives at

There are loads of race Mustangs there running coil-overs with no issues.

Like many serious mods, coil-overs take some care and research to be properly installed and used. There are risks that one should understand. You shouldn't just slap a set on without understanding what is going on and thinking it over before making the decision. I went through all of this before putting my kit in. I have every confidence in the kit and the car with the wheel rates I chose. I inspect the kit regularly to make sure there is no coil bind to prevent the things we've talked about. A poor choice can lead to other problems, not just strut tower damage.

Dan

2003 Cobra convertible With some stuff on it.