Appealing to the hive for help finding struts to hold open the hatch on my AE86 that are *weaker* than standard replacements.
I have a fiberglass TRD hatch, and the one and only one time I tried bolting on my nowhere-near-fresh struts, the hatch shot fully open in about a nanosecond. It was so violent I heard ugly fiberglass cracking sounds, feared the window would break, and am pretty sure the rear end of the car hopped off the ground when it topped out! :)
They are 24" extended, about 16" compressed (center-to-center) and have a ball-and-socket arrangement at both ends with 8mm threads on the ball stud. Taking one and pushing down on a thick board on the bathroom scale, it reads about 80 pounds of force to get one moving, and holding it midway closed takes about 55ish pounds of force. I'm guessing that something with half to thirds the force would be good.
Any ideas? I haven't found a local parts store with their supply out and available to dig through.
What about sacrificing one by causing a leak in it? Would give you half the pressure by only having one pushing on it but would still help stabilize it by being there as a guide.
Could test out the theory by just removing one of them and seeing if the hatch twists under the uneven torque.
Hit your local junk yard and find some dead ones ?
java230
SuperDork
9/20/17 1:45 p.m.
Amazon has lots, I dont quite know how they rate them though.
30# ones Amazon Link
NEALSMO said:
Could test out the theory by just removing one of them and seeing if the hatch twists under the uneven torque.
I tried this and the twisting was more significant than I would like.
I also tried a "trade my good for your blown" approach in the local community, but they've moved to Facebook, and the marketplace is berkeleying terrible, no quick way to tell the age of an ad, the location of someone responding to the ad, everyone wants me to download a snooping app to further discuss the specifics rather than posting in the thread, and the majority of for sale threads in the whole thing are technical help requests or people wanting to post pics (nothing for sale at all) but they can't figure out how to post discussion on their phone app, so they just crap the place up with endless new sale threads with a price of free or $86,868,686 or whatever....
"Get off my lawn!" :)
I think you would be further ahead to fab some spring in a tube style ones yourself or change the pivot points to get a favorable ratio. Maybe depressurize a nitrogen one, TIG on a fitting, and add an air chuck so you can adjust PSI with a motorcycle fork pump (made for high pressure/low volume like you are working with)
I would think a hood strut the same length would be ideal since a normal hood should weigh a lot less than a hatch with glass.
