First off, thanks to Justin Taylor at Rockstar Garage for making this an unbelievably easy and straight forward install. I’m very impressed with the quality of the bar, and the customer service I received. A+ for first purchase with them!

Approx time to install: 4-8 hours
People recommended: 1 is fine, 2 is better

Now depending on how involved you want to get is up to you on trimming of the interior plastic and other pieces. For this installs purposes, my S2000 is more track purpose than street driven. That being said I won’t be showing the trimming portion, as I won’t be reinstalling those pieces back in the car. Once your RSG roll bar shows up, go to town like a little kid opening a present on Christmas Day. Then put it back down before you drop it on your toes. Grab your trusty jack of choice and go about putting the rear of the car on jack stands and removing the rear wheels. You’ll be working in and around the rear wheel wells so I would also recommend to chock your front tire(s).

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Retract your soft top all the way to the stowed position or completely remove the hardtop for ease of access. I removed my hardtop but am also permanently removing the underneath soft top as well. Remove both driver and passenger side seat.

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With all this room to work with now, we’ll start by removing the plastics and center console glass.

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Once out, this will expose the factory roll hoops and center support beam with the mounting points for seat belts. There are 8 bolts for each roll hoop. After these bolts are removed, there should be approx 3 screws holding down the remainder of the roll hoop plastics to the top of the center support beam.

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With the hoops out of the way, we’ll move on to removing the center support beam. Start by removing the factory seat belt screws. There are some clips that keep the harness attached to the support beam and I simply removed them completely. To unclip the SRS harness you squeeze the tangs together and pull the clip out. The driver side of the support beam pictured here replicated both sides identical. I took the support beam off in 3 pieces, center and both sides by removing all screws. For us with hardtop mounts, this will also completely remove our ability to use the rear lower bracket bolt (unless yours are different).

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This next step is completely up to you. I believe this bar was designed to go over the sound reducing material but my ocd didn’t like that, so I chose to remove it under the bar. Again, completely up to you. I used a heat gun set to medium and a plastic scraper to get it all off. I didn’t go with the dry ice technique, although probably would have been easier. Reason being is the scraper leaves behind a lot of sticky gunk, dry ice doesn’t. But if you have 3M adhesive remover, it was a breeze to come right off. I’ve heard others mention goo gone as well. You can see how clean it actually came out.

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Now it’s just a matter of positioning the bar to the point of marking the post holes for drilling. Use 2 of the 10mm bolts on the front side of the front posts to hold the bar in place. Make sure your rear posts are evenly spaced on both sides before marking. Using the rear wheel tubs for reference worked out great for me. Once marked, unbolt the 2 10mm bolts and remove the roll bar.

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Drill time! I believe I used a 3/8 bit. If you don’t have a lot of confidence in your drill skills, I’d say it’s a safe idea to step your sizes up. As you start drilling, you’ll notice the front most, front post hole, isn’t accessible without cutting in to the rear pan. Start by marking the area for a cut and what you want is good enough access to slide your backing plates on. Approx 2” top to bottom and width of the plate across leaving room on both sides. I pretty much cut in to the corner, that gave enough room. I used a dremel and saw zall, but in the middle there is a support piece. Be careful as you cut and practice good tool control so that whatever you’re using, doesn’t come back at you when cutting in this area. Cutting wheel is probably ideal, just didn’t have it handy at the time.

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After your holes are in place go back and temp install the bar again with those front 2 10mm bolts. Now it’s time to slide in the backing plates. The undercoating material for me got in the way of the rear bolt on the front post. Without risking cutting in to the pan to separate this, I just simply beat it with a hammer (taking in mind this is thinner metal, so don’t beat too hard) then went back on top and equally beat down to get it flush enough that there wasn’t a gap. Once you snug down the bolts they’ll effectively sandwich it flat regardless but you wanna keep it as minimally beaten as possible.

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Once all 4 backing plates are hand tight, alternate sides and holes until snug. After snug, feel free to go back and re do all the bolts using your calibrated hand until nice and tight. These are grade 10 bolts, so don’t be afraid to tighten them. No specific torque value was given for these.

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At this point it’s a good idea to put your wheels back on, torque your lug nuts and go for a drive.

But what about the hole?

Leave it open for now, just don’t take it out in the rain before sealing. However, the car naturally flexing during the drive may loosen some of the bolts. Once you’ve put some miles on the car. Jack the rear back up, remove the rear wheels and re snug down all the bolts (mine never loosened but I also snugged them, pretty good).

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With this gap left here for the backing plates, it’s up to you on how to fill or cover it. I have plans to go full weld in cage within due time, so I personally used a $7 yoga mat foam from Walmart and a $2 tube of caulking. This so I can easily cut it back out to remove the bar when necessary. When it was dry I sprayed about 3 coats of black undercoating spray ($5 from O’ Reilly) over the caulking.

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Again, at this point it’s up to you on how to trim and re fit the trim panels. If you’re going harnesses, now is obviously a good time to install them before putting the top back on. RSG also sells a factory seat belt mounting bar option that will attach to any of their roll bars.

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Now that your bar is installed, it’s time to sit down, strap in, and get your S2000 on the track for some fun.

Next blog post will be first few track days in the track prepped S2K! Make sure to stay tuned and follow me @kbooty on instagram!

You probably can with the right size drill bits, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The angle of the drill was pretty extreme in some spots and unless you have a really long bit, you’re not going to get the rear side bolts that hug the tubs

I sold my NFR AP1 about 5 years ago lol. I will have everything striped out in due time. Didn’t want this to turn in to a project as have so many as is