Wandering Shock Tower Mounts

fiatfactory said:
...makes me laugh when people try to adapt parts from all sort of other cars... I mean 40 years later a 128 or an X19 mount is still available... will a ford focus mount be available in 40 years? and remember it's thinking like that which puts the Fiat parts vendors out of business.

SteveC
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These strut mounts were a non-issue for so many years, then a bad batch came from third-party suppliers and people go off the deep end. Luckily for us, two X1/9 legends step in (Mark Plaia and Chris Obert) to right the ship and produce an improved strut mount along with several other product enhancements (Big Foots and Plaia Pivots).

That being said, in fairness to the Ford Focus experiment, they were tried as an alternative to the stock parts on a high performance build with extreme spring and damping rates that stock parts were not able to support.
 
As a side note, the Vics coilovers come with solid upper mounts.
I'd like to think the "terrible" mounts are all off the market now. On the rat I had Koni struts and cut stock springs with no ill effects on the upper rubber mount.
 
carl said:
the Vics coilovers come with solid upper mounts
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What's kind of neat about them is they have urethane between the strut and the solid mount. And the urethane is a fairly soft (relatively) duro so they aren't nearly as harsh as most "solid" mounts. But definitely still much firmer than stock mounts. So it may depend on your intended use and desired comfort level. This also applies to the heavy duty stock type units designed by Plaia, firmer than original stock ones.
 
I think if you have to depend on the softness of a strut mount to be part of the suspension that the spring and dampener rates are not the right spec.
 
I see it as more of a vibration/sound dampener than a part of the active suspension, for a road car. Track car is different.
 
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