After building my first strut tower brace for my '76 sedan, I quickly realized a design "flaw." While it fit perfectly on my '76, it would not fit at all on my friend's '73 sedan. It was nearly 1/4" off in length! I e-mailed a few other friends who owned 128s and had them measure the distance between their strut towers. There was a significant range in measurements. Whether this is due to factory tolerances during production, unibody fatigue, or something else entirely is yet to be determined.
When I redesigned my strut tower brace, I decided that I would build the new brace to fit ANY 128. To this end, I incorporated threaded rod ends on the ends of the brace so that the length of the brace can be adjusted. This also alows some mis-alignment between the plates that bolt to the tops of the strut towers so I didn't have to do any complicated geometry in order to make the "ears" that attach to those plates. I replaced the rectangular box tube with round tube. The tapered section on each end of the brace were machined from solid round stock and welded on to the tube. One side is left-hand threaded, the other right-hand threaded, so the brace can be pre-loaded once installed. Material is 6061-T6 aluminum. Oh, the plastic wrap on the brace in the pics was just to keep it from getting scratched during installation. If I can find the time, I'll post the drawings for this brace as well.
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