PY Online Forums - Bringing the Pontiac Hobby Together - SC&C HD Chassis brace. Install and review

A few weeks back I took a trip to St Paul for the Street Machine Nationals to Auto X. While at the track, I encountered a guy with a g-body that had a SC&C chassis like mine. He had pony'd up for the SC&C HD Chassis brace. This is a very common upgrade for G body guys. It triangulates the front frame rails and apparently even GM recognized there was an issue because they used a stamped version on the performance G body cars.

I had kind of scoffed at it a bit at first but then talking to this guy about his, he was very impressed and he said the difference was instant and very noticeable, even over his stock ones he had removed. Marc had talked about how the front frame rails on these cars move under load and that the steering box takes all the abuse under steering conditions. This brace triangulates everything, ties it all together and distributes the load and A body cars really could have used these and really benefit from them...

So I bought one. $217 shipped. It looks like about maybe $30 bucks worth of material if you wanted to hack one together yourself. This one is nice though and has bends where they need to be and it has a nice coating so ok.... Ill be the guinea pig.

I will say I'm impressed with how much of a difference this made. My G body guy was right, it made the car much more snappy and athletic feeling. I had about 3 hrs installing it and the difference was pretty noticeable from the first corner I turned even at slow speed. I'm not sure how the frame rails move that much under load? You would think that they would wreck body panels with that much movement but they must, because the steering feels much more responsive.

Here it is

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The instructions say you have to center the piece, drill 2 3/8" Holes in the frame rails and 2 5/16" holes and tap for 3/8x16 in the engine cradle. That didn't go well for me. I ended up stripping the tapped holes in the cradle upon final TQ....so I got a 1.5" hole saw out and made a little room to get some nylocks and washers on the back of the bolts that go in the cradle. Oh well, at least its not some numbers matching frame and there was a hole there anyways so....

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I also ended up having to use .195" washers to space it down a bit to miss the swaybar. It says in the instructions this might happen so I was prepared. Inside the frame I had a buttlap weld right in the middle of the hole I drilled leaving a very uneven surface. This was leaving my bolt angled. I tried to get away with just tightening it down but I snapped a bolt off upon final TQ inside the frame rail. I used on of the thick washers to take up the difference inside the framerail and leave a flat surface for the nut to snug up against. Just a bench grinder and file was all that was needed...

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So I got that all done, TQ'd it down to 35 ft lbs all the way around, checked for interference and took it for a drive....this gentlemen is a great picture as to why you don't buy hooker super comp headers...

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