SPOON rigid collars

One of the highlights earlier this year was my meeting with Mr SPOON, Ichishima-San at his office in Tokyo, it was an interesting discussion.
It always surprises me how neat and tidy these Japanese offices and factory workshops are.

Since then, I’ve been installing several sets of SPOON Rigid Collars on various cars, I must admit, though the first 5 sets arrived in February this year, we had them sitting around til almost May!

I guess there was alot of apprehension and mis-understanding on our part prior to installing.

FAQ: the lessons learnt
1.) The Rigid Collars dont need to be the last modification you do to your car.
Because the Collars sit between the interface of the front &/or rear subframes and the car chassis, installing suspension, even dropping a rear differential will not affect the Collars. For the MX5 and Honda S2000, not even for a clutch change will u need to drop the subframes, unless if you’re rebuilding your engine.

2.) Can the Rigid Collars be reused?
Though SPOON doesnt answer that question, from what I have seen is that if the subframe has been aligned straight onto the chassis, and the Subframe bolts were handtighted, the squashing effect on the collars isnt as great as SPOON’s video have you imagine. On top of that, I realised that we dont drop our subframes that often too.

3.) What do the Collars do?
ok it is best explained via the SPOON Europe’s own marketing video, here’s the link

From my layman perspective..
We have seen many brand new cars on the wheel alignment machine having a different range of wheel alignment adjustments between the Left and Right wheels.
Sometimes it is because of the manufacturing tolerances inherent in manufacturing, that a car has the ability to achieve up to 1 degree more castor on one side than the other.

Sometimes if a car has been in an accident before, the subframe can lose its alignment, being skewed to one side, we used to send such cars to chassis alignment specialists to have them realign the subframe, but at such a great cost.

Rigid Collars are sort of like a tolerance bushing/ crush washer/ sleeve that fills up the tolerance gap between the subframe bolts and the subframe and the subframe interface to the chassis.

Because of the close fitting nature of the Rigid Collars, the Collars will only fit if the subframe is aligned square onto the chassis.

So how does the car feel after the installing the collars? Well I’ll continue that onto another post

heres some pictures of us fitting on the Rigid Collars.

HONDA S2000 kit

MX5 NC 2006-2011 kit

MX5 NC 2006-2011 front Rigid Collar installation