Paranoid Fabrications Fender braces! What a little extra stiffness can do for you and your ride. (Initial review)
Welcome to this week's #modmonday! We will take our initial thoughts and looks at @paranoidfabrications SG fender braces. These are made for SG Forester 04-08, but be aware that early model 04 Forester might be missing the rear bolt holes, be sure to check your car before ordering.
Here there are! Simple yet very effective!
When your Subaru was being designed it was deemed necessary that the front half(engine bay and forward) be attached to the passenger compartment. But their thinking is for safety and cost effectiveness.. Nothing more nothing less. While this is perfectly fine to 99.9% of consumers when the car is in our hands it’s a completely different story.
When you look up into your fender well… you will find empty bolts holes that Subaru put on the car but left empty.
With the front wheel outside of the main structure of the unibody the vibrations and uneven road forces can vibrate the front half of the car like a diving board. When you add the fender braces you give it another path for the vibrations to travel through. And another support brace that extends past the standard attaching point.
With that deficiency on our hands many companies have come to the rescue by bringing out beefy fender braces to fix this concern. For most driver’s they are looking to add these to keep the driver and passenger side from flexing during turns so that tire contact where your alignment angles want it to be. This can be immediately felt when taking your first turn after installing these, and it is awe inspiring. It can really give you a lot of confidence while out on the race track.
That improvement alone makes these a very worthwhile upgrade but what if I told you there was more… Much more! Driving down the highway finding yourself quickly running up on a less than smooth bridge transition you will find the jarring force is much less noticeable in the steering wheel, the fender braces now transfer that large jolt to the car instead of only the front end taking the brunt. This gives your Subaru a much more refined ride quality whether at highway speeds or in town.. It makes you wonder how such a small piece of metal can do such a thing.
These can be installed by removing the fender to ease or by just pulling down the fender liner. My only troubles with these came in the form of a pinch weld that obstructed my installation, if I had removed the fender this would have been much easier to see. But with my trusty die grinder I was able to shave just a slight amount off and install them. SG Foresters 03-08 seem to just have slight differences as some early 03-04 models don’t have the rear bolt holes to install them, so your model may have no of these above issues.
If you don’t want to remove the fender, you can pull the fender liner and just enough room to install them.
Two holes on unibody that are covered by Subaru. Now it’s ready for what should have been installed from the factory!
I found it necessary to grind one section to help clear a pinch weld. Your car may or may not need this.
Who would I recommend these to? Anybody looking to add a smooth turn in to their car or add a touch of refinement to their Forester with no downsides that I am aware of. I will keep note on these during the next few months and add a full review of any downsides I find and how well they hold up!
Just a little notch and they are installed!
Ready to test! Install guide coming soon!
Link!
https://www.paranoidfabrications.com/products/forester-fender-braces