Long story short - plenum spacer + oem hood + oem strut bar, fine. plenum spacer + seibon hood + oem strut bar, not fine.

went through a few hoops to make it work with no luck, decided on ordering a stillen strut tower brace as it was a 'surefire' thing to make it work for my application, since it goes in front of the plenum.

it arrived in what I consider fairly poor condition. the welds are shitty and inconsistent, it looks like a toddler did the welds, there are burn marks on multiple parts on it, and there are multiple scratches on it. wtf? this is one of the highest cost strut tower braces on the market, I expect some quality, unreasonable?

oh well, I say to myself, at least it will work. then I found out I had to remove my oem engine cover to make it fit, then I found out I have to reroute a bunch of electrical to make it work since it's pinching them.. arg.

figure, might as well go with a different one, try out a flat style one like GT spec or something. it will look better and probably work, we'll see.

call stillen. put on hold for over 30 minutes after talking to multiple reps. they made it difficult to get a return authorization and left us on hold for a 20 minute period on one of these stints. they couldn't tell us the return policy or the restocking fee, and had zero flexibility when someone finally knew what it was.

25% restocking fee for a sub quality scratched up part with no warnings about what the average customer probably didn't consider in advance. cool, thanks guys. more upset about the time and the treatment then the cost to return the product. when I complained about the defects he simply told me "It's for functionality, not form".. really.

25%, 62 bucks or so, not a huge deal, they are just jerks about it and handled it poorly. after some consideration I decided to ask my preferred shop owner/friend about a possible custom fab job. modifying the oem engine cover so it still looked good, rerouting some electrical casing and wires, and just using the bar.

 

That stinks dude

 

yeah, it's really not that big of a deal, I just felt a kick in the nuts since I had defended them a couple weeks earlier since they seemed to have a strong forum presence with good customer service. figured I would reverse that and give them a little of what they deserve, so others are aware.

 

told you so, I think it was you that said everyone should learn from steve millen's customer service. hahaha

 

on the forum facing the public they seem to really go out of their way to make things right and tolerate even the most demanding and stupid of customers. on the phone one on one they could care less.

 

Inb4 Stillen rep comes and sugar coats

Also, why is this in brakes and susp?

 

Welding looks ok to me

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo...eat=directlink

 

dunno db, it was for a suspension piece.

 

once this makes it to the popular thread list im sure steve will chime in

 

FAIL

Did you even read the thread or do you just like posting random pics of welds?

 

yeah, I didn't make some bogus claim that every weld they've ever done is garbage, just stating that it looks pretty poor on the item I got from them.

form over function guys. poor welds and scratches are fine if it's functional.

 

why fail? there was a general point being made about stillen weld quality, the pictures u see there are the stillen headers sitting in my living room at the moment.

 

I wouldn't call it a fail, just kind of a weird thing to jump in with. I am sure everyone is aware that the majority of a MFG's products come out quality enough and that some shitty ones slip on through now and then.

long story short.. my local shop stood by stillens product and put in some free labor to make me happy with it, great guys there at VTR in Everett. he buffed out all the scratches and kinda semi polished it up a little bit, he cut the engine cover so I wouldn't have to ditch it entirely, he rerouted the electrical stuff, and he rethreaded the holes and gave me new hardware since the cheap nissan oem stuff was breaking :/

I only asked if he could cut the engine cover for me, I was just going to 'deal' with the rest of it, but he really went above and beyond and didn't charge me a cent for the work, here's how it came out.

 

That's a pretty clean install. I was thinking of getting this strut brace but after reading this post I'm thinking no.

Is this thing structurally strong? The pic is kinda small but it just seems to have some really weak points where it attaches to the plates.

 

I'm not sure honestly. I think the middle plate that is welded to the two bars will be the thing to break if anything, that's where the welds looked pretty shoddy..

if you are looking for a in-front-of-the-plenum type of strut brace, I would email Crawford. they don't make them anymore but they will do a one-off for you for the normal retail price, just takes a couple of weeks. I wish I would have!