Thank You John, I got through half of that and my mind started to explode......
Good stuff there though every one here should read this
Good stuff there though every one here should read this
When I worked at Chrysler Engineering starting back in 1969, I did investigate putting a beefier sway bar on my newly acquired 70 300 coupe. I talked with the suspension engineering guys about this installation, and they said that use of a beefier sway bar on a C body coupe especially was not necessarily a good thing, since it made the car plow in turns more than the standard front sway bar. Rear sway bars were used on the 4 door sedans as an option to improve this plowing tendency if special ordered, such as the police units, as I understood them at the time, but even there, they were not overall that much more helpful they said. It was partly a weight distribution thing too as I recall. As it was, they were struggling with rear wheel hop with the leaf springs on the coupes under panic braking conditions in part for the same reason.
Steve
The primary function of the anti‐roll bar is to adjust the understeer/oversteer balance of the car during cornering, which it accomplishes by fine‐tuning the amount of load that transfers to the outside tires at the front versus the rear. A stiffer anti‐roll bar at one end of the car will increase the load on the outside tire at that end. If both bars are made stiffer, the load transferred will remain the same, but overall chassis roll will be reduced, which may require a camber adjustment. Remember, one of the primary goals is to find a good balance between grip at the front and rear of the car.....
Sounds really good and some good advice too on making sure the rest of the suspension is up to snuff. What was the front sway bar diameter on your car originally - 7/8" or ?? Do you think the new rear springs with a 1" higher stance helped some of this improved feel too - in other words, did you do the springs and rear sway bar together or separate to evaluate?
Did Firm Feel rebuild your steering box too or someone else? I had some problems with their rebuilt steering gears in the past and have switched to Steer & Gear, but maybe Firm Feel has upped their game a notch?
This is really good input and I will probably be making the same changes to some of my cars too to improve stability and cornering. Thanks for keeping us updated.
I put one of these on my C-body and you really need to give this a bit of thought before installing. First, the links should go in front of the axle and be exactly verticle on installation. When these are installed properly, the downward/upward force is perpendicular to the springs exactly the way they should be. When you mount the sway bar on top the stand-offs you will notice it may be on the short side to reach the frame rails. Again the sway bar must be parallel to the springs as much as possible. I refused to drill into the bottom of the sub frame as I could see there wasn't a great amount of thickness here and had visions of frame distortion or just plain ripping out. Either case, the bottom curved metal of the frame would be seriously compromised by drilling holes - just the right place for cracks to start in the frame rail. I took pieces of stiff cardboard and bent them to get patterns for U-saddles to bolt to the sides of the frame rails. Leaving the legs of these templates fairly long, I was able to move the U-templates in or out to support the sway bar rear swivel mounts at exactly the right spot to maintain parallelism and have the drop links verticle. The U-channels were then trimmed and bolted through the sides of the rails and the sway bar swivel mounts bolted to the face of them. That was two years ago and general inspection shows no negative results doing it this way. Be sure to use a minimum of 14g metal if you do it this way. You will notice when bending the templates that the frame tapers slightly but any good metal shop can bend and supply them cheaply. Mine were $20 the pair and fit perfectly as the shop used my U-channel templates. These sway bars work fantastic when installed properly but as stated earlier the front links must be verticle and the sway bar return links parallel to the springs with the car sitting on it's tires, not jacked with the axle dropped.