OK, well that took way longer than I thought! What else is new.
I was just going to put this in my build thread, but on second thought , decided I'd share it here also. As everyone knows, the Street and Coupe versions of our cars are woefully lacking any meaningful door overlap or intrusion protection in the event of a side impact. Unlike factory cars, which have doors that overlap both the A and B-pillars, the only thing keeping a wayward SUV from entering our cockpits, especially at the rear of the door, is a striker plate...Ugggghhhh!
Understand I am not wishing to build a lead-encased factory job, but I felt a little extra weight here might be worth the expense. Basically, I reinforced the upper, inner, door frame with a similar sized, heavy-walled piece of tubing, then built impingement plates fore and aft to keep said door frame from easily entering the cockpit. The front plates hide under the dash pad end pieces and the rear plates look intrusive at first, but actually extend vertically downward from the coupe's inner window area framework. Both plates are 10 ga steel. Since the front area already has some existing framework close-in, I chose thin-walled tubing for these reinforcements. For the rears (being extremely critical at ~8" from my head) I chose heavy, 1/8" wall tubing and triangulated them to the rear cockpit framework. The fronts weigh 2 lbs each and the rears weigh 4.5 lbs each. Each door reinforcement tube adds 3 lbs. And please pardon my strong but sometimes not-so-pretty welding.