Jamex (long)

[Tessie McMillan]

Hey Ben - Jamex is not available anymore; the company that makes them went
out of business. I called every Audi tune shop on the web that I could find
(and then some), and got the same story. I settled on pestering 2Bennett
when I found out they had a *Sparco* brace they thought would fit. They
promised to try it in a customer's car and see if it would fit mine, but
they were pretty busy so they never got around to calling me. So I called
them every day for more than a week until they finally said "hey we just
took a few-month-old Jamex out of a customer's car, do you want it?" &:-)

It looks more like a couple years old rather than a couple months old, but
it's a nice bar and I'm not complaining! It has 2 segments, one short and
one long, with bends to fit around the battery. You can tighten the bar and
apply pressure to the strut towers by honking on the locking nut between the
2 segments. The bar is maybe 1-1/2" in diameter -- much thicker than an
anti-sway bar. My mechanic had to drill 2 holes in my strut housing
(bitching the whole time because there were 2 sheets of metal to go through,
not just one). He used an aircraft bit about 3' long to do the drilling. I
had to deal with my engineer friend reminding me that "aluminum is not as
strong as steel, and anything with a bend in it is not going to be as strong
as a straight bar from strut to strut, and by the way a strut bar is NOT
GOING TO HELP YOUR 80Q because the struts are close to the firewall" -- but
I kept to my guns and had the bar put in, along with the urQ-style strut
mounts. We removed the cruise-control pump to find room. Unfortunately, the
cruise control pump doesn't weigh as much as the bar, so I have some
increased weight.

I didn't expect the car to feel any different, but the front end felt
stiffer/more rigid the first time I drove it. Did not feel more difficult on
turning, however. The test will be on the track in a couple of weeks.

So, then I went to have my car aligned at a local Porsche tune shop
(Speedware). Seeing as I had been chunking my right front track tire out at
SIR, and had no wear along the inside 1-1/2" of all four of my track tires,
I asked them to introduce more negative camber... Funny thing is when they
got my car up on the rack, it already had a ton of negative camber! We maxed
my fronts out to -2.8 and the rears almost to -2 (I think that's right -- I
just know it's more than -1.5). Gee the car handles differently. Not so hard
to keep in a turn -- it just wants to keep coming around. Colin (one of the
owners) was worried that I might get too much tire wear with this setup. But
that's no big deal to me, I'll just go in and get another alignment if this
is too negative. I've already gutted so many sets of tires that doing this
little experiment will be more fun than anything else.

To save space, I'll send a separate note on Stebro.

Tess

-----Original Message-----
From: Swann, Benjamin R. (BSWANN) [mailto:BSWANN at arinc.com]
Subject: Jamex


Tess,

[teasingly not mentioning anything about her NEW JAMEX STRUT TOWER BRACE!]

Being that I'd rather not take the one out of project car #1 and transplant
into the new blue Project GTQ #2, what is the best deal around on these now.

I got the previous one through a special offered through this list over a
year ago.

Also, same question for the Stebro for the 4000Q's if anyone knows.

Ben
http://www.homestead.com/Ben_Swann/myaudi.html