Strut Towers and tower bars

If you have a Civic, you must install strut tower bars, and this is a well-known fact.  Unless you don't have the internet, you basically understand how a strut tower bar works and how it mounts to the frame.  Every aftermarket bar I've seen (with the exception of the Neuspeed unit with two small contact pads) has a large, flat mount surface that is secured to the shock top-hat studs.  This is actually a very good way to brace the frame, since the loads are transferred directly from the shock to the bar without having a separate mount point on the sheetmetal, as per some OEM tower bars (Integra, EG civic, etc).

However, your Civic, as mine did, may have a problem with flat area on the shock towers.  See the below pics:

You need to remove the body sealer circled in red.  I took a screwdriver and GENTLY pried the bulk of the sealer off the strut tower.  After that, you'll need a Dremel with a couple different brushes.  At first, use the nylon-bristle brush to remove any remaining sealer.  After that, take a stainless-steel brush to remove as much surface rust as you can.  After those steps, your tower will look like this:

When you're satisfied with the level of crap-removal, clean the surface with rubbing alcohol.  This not only removes particulate contamination, but also removes grease and oils and stuff.

Post-alcohol, it looks like this

After that, start masking stuff off.  Here's some pics:

You can see what's basically going on so I won't give the play-by-play.

After that, I shot three coats of primer and three of Duplicolor metallic black that, in theory, matches Honda black.  Try to avoid overspray.

Towers are done:

...and the final result.  My color matching skills are terrible at best.  Honestly, the color difference is very noticeable with flash photography, and not so much otherwise.

Soon I will have a tower bar to detract from any color discrepancy, and it will have a nice mating surface on the shock tower.