After about a month it finally arrived via FedEx at my door step early yesterday morning, and was I excited! Inside the box I find a nice “EM Racing” sticker, a propaganda pamphlet touting “Engineering_Excellence” and “Machined_Perfection” that EM Racing demands. WOW sounds great, my heart races faster as I dig into the packaging in search of the holly land. There she is, nice and shiny new. What a sight to behold. Simple, elegant and still functional. Packaged with new longer bolts and spacers for us with ABS, does it get any better? NOPE. I was left hanging when I put the supplied bolt in the heim joint and found that they were not the same size. The bolt is of course a metric M10 while the heim joint is standard at 7/16”. Did I miss something the last 10 years that I have wrenched on my car while missing some odd standard size hardware? What happened here??
So the problem is the hole for the heim joint is 11.1mm or 0.4365 in., the hole for the spacer is 10.65mm or 0.420 in., and the bolt is 9.82mm or .03966 in. So your left with a 1.28mm gap between the bolt and the heim joint. And a gap of .83mm between the spacer and bolt. Which it should be a perfect fit, with no gap. Right? The bar does have adjustable ends, which screw outward or inward. Which in turns puts different forces onto the car where it bolts on. You would not want this bar bolted on in a neutral state, you would at least want them screwed out or in to exert the load which you desire.
Yes, I can install the bar so that the spaces are on the outsides, but I would still have the possibility of the chassis spreading outward, or vice versa. I think the space between he spacers is not much of a problem as it is with inconsistencies with hole diameters over all and the use of standard hardware on import vehicles using metric fasteners. To be fair I did send an email to info@emracing, I’m not sure if you (JDM1nt2B) work there or not. I’m confident that together we can find a solution to this.
My intention here is not to complain about the quality of EM Racing products by any means, it is just to point out minor inconsistencies in hopes that EM Racing can improve and build upon their great line of products.
No I do not work for them or have any affiliation with them. I contacted them a while back about making some of the other trunk bars for our cars and they were interested in working with G2IC to see if there was enough interest to put the new bars into production. This was one of those bars.
So basically your saying they should have used a metric heim joint? The spacer is a different issue. That is something they put on the lathe and make themselves.
I doubt anything. Although I would make sure the bolt is a high grade bolt, and it doesn’t look like it, they are usually gold color. But probably hard to locate in a metric.
Thank you JDM1nt2B for all your effort in bringing new products to our older rides!
The gold color of the bolts is just a sacrificial coating to prevent the actual bolt from corroding. None the less, you are correct on the strength of the supplied bolts. They are stamped with an 8.8 grade. After a little web searching I found a chart of metric grades of bolts here. Over here they say that a 10mm bolt should only be torqued to 33 ftlb, and my manual instructs to torque that bolt to 40 ftlb. Yes they should have used a metric heim joint instead of a 7/16th one.
Here is the really short email that I received from EM Racing concerning this issue.
“Be sure to utilize the left hand/righthand thread design by rotating
the unit after it is installed, putting the unit in a tensioned or
compressed state.”
Here is my reply:
"By either tensioning or compressing the rear lower tie points still does not solve the problem that there is room for movement, in which this bar is supposed to alleviate. The problem seems to lie in the fact that the heim joints are SAE and the bolts are metric. Another item that was found is that the supplied bolts are not designed to be torqued to the factory recommended value of 40 ftlb’s. They are the SAE equivalent of a grade 5. "
Am I in the wrong here in my thinking? After all if I wanted this kind of quality I could have picked up an entire set of Megan bars from eBay for just a little more. But I wanted the EM bar due to the use of heim joints and quality appearance.
If you put tension or compression on the bar/bolts I don’t really see the chassis where it mounts moving after that. Plus I just got my bar last night and there isn’t much room between the bolt and heim joint anyways.
mine also arrived on the 1/18/06 and noticed this aswell and seeing the bolt looked like it had less strengh than the stock bolt. I might be installing the bar in a few and see how it goes.
ot: how tight should I have bar at where it connects to the helm joint?
thanks
I got mine today! That thing is nice. Lightweight and just an overall good looking bar. I did notice the same fitment issues as posted above. I thought it would be an easy install but of course I was wrong. The sway bar got in the way and it was a bitch trying to match the LCA back up. Here are some pics…
i’d say mock it up, get some nails, where there’s a gap on the outside, fill it in with nails, put the spacer on, then bolt the sucker down, then twist the bar until it’s really tight… that should keep it tensioned & wouldnt move back too much…
:ghetto:
but question - is there such thing as a metric heim joint that large? and where to get it?
TEGBOI BARS!! w00t w00t gather information/gather supplies/put together parts R&D, test & tune and im good!
NCteg,
Did you use the spacers? I believe EMR said they weren’t needed, as the bar fit on without them, but included them for people with abs that didn’t want to flip the abs brackets out of the way.
tegboi: but question - is there such thing as a metric heim joint that large? and where to get it?
Here is a great place for any kind of bearing you may need. http://www.vxb.com/page/bearings/PROD/HR/POS10
I still need to call them and order male and female ends for the rear sway bar mod.
No I didn’t need the spacers but I also don’t have abs. The only major problem I had was my ST sway bar got in the way so I had to disconnect that so the bolts would go through.
