adjustable sway bar endlinks

[dangina]

I was wondering - does it make a difference if you hook up your sway bars with weight on them(tires on the ground) or up in the air like on a hoist? Does it matter?

[dutch55]

Dangina,


Yes, it matters. Do it on the ground. Here is why:

Ideally you want to start with the sway bars unloaded when the car is on the ground. If you can attache the end links without twisting the sway bars, they will be unloaded. If you attach them with the wheels in the air where the suspension is at full rebound, they might be preloaded on the ground, which will affect the bias of the understeer/oversteer balance between left and right turns (also called wedge). See http://grassrootsmotorsports.com/articles/understanding-corner-weights/

As a practical matter, if you don't have access to scales, assuming the frame or unibody isn't tweaked, with stock springs, or coilovers if you set the ride height the same on the left and right shock units you should be pretty close. Once it is on the ground, hook up the bars where the end link attachments don't put load on the sway bars when you tighten them down.

Once you have it set, you can use pre-load on a sway bar to fine-tune the handling. Although some will raise their eyebrows, there isn't anything wrong with pre-loading the front or rear sway bar by lengthening or shortening one of the links to change the wedge. I used to regularly change the pre-load on the front sway bar of my s Corvette between runs at an autocross. For example, if there was a left-hand turn where I thought less understeer would help, I would shorten the RF sway bar link to reduce the weight on the LR+RF diagonal. A half-turn t a turn of the rod end would often be enough to make a noticable difference. That change would increase the understeer on a right-hand turn, but that's why they call suspension tuning being all about making trade-offs.

If somebody tells you you should only be messing with cross-weight if you have the car on scales, politely ask them what the NASCAR pit crews are doing "putting a round of wedge" in during a pit stop (and they do it at Sonoma and Watkins Glen, not just at places where they only turn left).

[dangina]

great article! Wish i could afford a set of scales right now, its definitely on the list for the future. This is the answer I'm looking for, thanks!