X74 rear brace install

Posted this on Renntech but figured it might be useful here too Don't ask me what this thing does, but here are some pics of where it goes. My X74 kit didn't come with instructions, and the best info I could find on installing this was it goes in the rear taillight and it is real easy These instructions are for an 02 C2 cab YMMV To remove the tail light you need a 10mm socket to remove one screw. Once removed you need a T20 torx bit to remove the two screws holding in the tailight bracket Here is the tail light bracket The massive X74 rear brace! And here is where it goes Install rear tailight and put 10mm screw/bolt back in and you are done. One work of caution, when reinstalling the taillight mounting bracket get it back in the same position as it was before you removed it and your tail light should be flush. I didnt pay much attention to the first one and it took me a couple of minutes of fiddling around with it to get it right . When I did the other one I put the bracket back in the same place and the tail light lined up perfectly. The second one took less than 5 minutes to do. probably more like 2

wow, nice work, just can't believe how big that "brace" is

Yeah tell me about it. However the install was worth it because I found out I am missing one of the rear deck lid shock things.

Pardon my ignorance, but wtf does that brace do?

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hahaha that's great. Off to look at my decklid

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Thats the million dollar question........ They are part of the X74 suspension package so I figured it was worth 10 minutes of my time to install it.

What alignment settings did you end up going with?

GTE said it was so low that they couldnt do much with it. I will have to look but I want to say -0.5 up front and -2.1 in the back.

Well it appears that only C4S, TT, GT2 and GT3's have shock thingies on both sides of the rear deck lid. Can anybody with a C2 cab (any year will do but 02-04 is what I have) verify that they have only one strut holding up the rear deck lid?

This probably just keeps the chasis from flexing that little bit under high stress loads in that location to prevent cracking the taillight lense?

I've been doing some research on chassis rigidity, and I can say that often times the smallest things make quite the difference. It is hard to imagine how that piece makes a huge (or even perceptible) difference. It'd be great if someone could shed more light on this... Ahmet

My cab has only one rear lid shock as well.

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Thanks, I figured you would go look