With the bar installed, my soft top still works perfectly. My 99' has the glass window too. My one complaint is that I have probably made the car more dangerous for myself personally by putting this bar in. Because I am rather tall for this car (6' 0") I sit with the seat all of the way back and with some recline to keep my head lower. Even with this, my head is maybe a little more than an inch under the top portion of the main hoop. That isn't even the part that concerns me the most. With the seat all the way back, the head rest actually lies behind the side support of the bar. Which means in any sort of collision where my head goes to the side, I am probably going to die from brain trauma. WOOT WOOT, QUICK AND FULL OF PAIN, just the way I like it! They of course make padding for things like this and I am hoping to get a racing seat with side head protection for that and so it will lower me even more. This is my warning to tall people that own this car and want the Hard Core M2 roll bar.
Now to the install. The first thing I am going to say is that in the instructions it does not say anything about removing the seats or the top. While I am sure you can get it done with them in the car, for your own sanity TAKE THEM BOTH OUT! The top on the NB is rather easy to remove and will take you far less time to take off and put on than you will save by trying to do everything with it on. To take the top off there are three bolts on the drivers and passenger side right behind the door frame and in front of the seat belt reel.
Front three bolt locations
Then along the back of the top on the inside of the car you will see three black strips of sheet metal with a bunch of nuts holding them on. This is what holds the weather stripping tight to the car to keep water out. Remove all of the nuts. After that, there are two more plastic plugs holding the weather stripping to the car. They are located behind where the three bolts were, between the frame and the seat belt. The clips hold a little end piece for the rubber trimming that goes around the car which can now be removed. Once the end caps are off, the top should come out.
Once it is out and you have removed all of the carpet and plastic pieces, and the piece of sheet metal (package tray cover) that has 16 bolts holding it for whatever reason you should have something that looks like this.
Now at this point you can try to put the bar in the car, but it will likely get caught on the battery cable and some other wires that you can't get past on the passenger side. So to get around this I cut out the sheet metal to have a pocket large enough that you could just drop the mounting plate in without having to slide it backwards. You are going to have to cut the sheet metal no matter what, it just depends on how much you want to take out. I cut it using an edge grinder with a cutting wheel. Worked perfectly! The pockets I cut out are shown below.
Now the bar should slide right in. The next step is to bolt the bar to the lower seat belt reel bolt. I put the seat belts back in at this point too.
You can see how the bars fit for the rear mounting points.
Now it is time to start drilling some holes! The first hole for the rear mounts is probably the hardest part of putting this bar in if you do not have the proper tools. I cut the pocket back far enough so I had a direct line of sight for one of the holes on each 'foot'. It is rather deep to get a hand drill in there to drill the hole, so I recommend getting a long drill bit if you can. If not do what I did and use a socket!
Once the first hole is drilled you can bolt the back plate to the other side and use it as a pattern like they say in the instructions. On the passenger side do not forget to pull the evaporation system filter or whatever it is out from its snap in pocket. I also removed the canister that is held on with a 10mm bolt. It lies in front of the calipers. Unfortunately at this point I was getting a little excited and dropped the ball on taking pictures so I don't have any of that. You will also need to jack the back end up and remove the rear wheels and the wheel well plastic guards towards the front of the car.
The rest of the install is as easy as drilling holes and putting bolts through them. My back plates didn't all match up perfectly with the body contour, but once you cinch them down tight it will deform the body to make a flat surface.
Once that is done put it all back together. That evaporation system filter will lose its home to rear passenger mounting plate. I pushed it behind some wires and zip tied it into place.
The final product:
You can see the seat lies behind the bar when it is pushed all the way back
So there it is. The first modification to the car. More to come in the future!
