[DeTomaso] Sway Bar Mounts on A-arms

[boyd casey]

You misunderstood. My friend advised me against going with Heim joints on
the sway bar to a-arm connection. He never said it would damage the car.
What he said was it it would have a detrimental effect on the handling if I
were to hit a major pot hole or other defect in the road surface which are
quite common here in New York. He said that the force of the impact would be
transferred to the opposite wheel because the Heim joint didn't allow for
much give. He said if I were building a car for track use it would be fine
but for a car primarily driven on the street (especially imperfect road
surfaces) I would be better off sticking with rubber bushings (like the ones
I have) on my sway bars.
Boyd

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 2:35 AM, <MikeLDrew at aol.com> wrote:

>
> In a message dated 5/9/10 15 23 28, JDeRyke at aol.com writes:
>
>
> Boyd, he's probably not familiar with Panteras which are definitely not
> race cars. He's right about the 1" sway bar causing problems, which if its
> a
> solid 1" bar, will overwhelm the rear of the frame rails and twist them
> proportionally with the giant bar. This will eventually lead to cracking
> somewhere.
>
>
> >>>Has this ever happened in the history of Panteras?  I would suggest that
> it has not.
>
> The vendors have sold hundreds and hundreds of 1-inch swaybars and a lot of
> people here are using them.  Your description makes it sound like they would
> tear the back of the car to pieces.  The worst-case scenario MIGHT be
> breaking an A-arm mount, I think.  The only failure mode I personally know
> of is hollow sway bars snapping under racetrack use.
>
> When Jack and I tested swaybars together with Larry Stock in the early
> 1990s, we found that performance went down, not up, when we moved from the
> Euro GTS 7/8 bar to the 1-inch bar.  However, that car didn't have the
> benefit of a chassis stiffening kit.  It would be interesting to repeat that
> experiment now--it wouldn't surprise me if the results were quite different
> today, if the chassis was appropriately stiffened.
>
> In any case, I still maintain that dollar for dollar, the single best
> improvement you can make to a Pantera is to ditch the stock 3/4 rear bar and
> replace it with a 7/8 bar.  The front bar is already 7/8 and can be safely
> left alone.  I don't think that the improvements associated with changing
> both bars to 1-inch are worth the effort or cost.
>
> And Boyd, your mechanic is either clueless, or you're misunderstanding him
> when you say that he told you that installing a sway bar that is 1/8 of an
> inch larger than the factory option bar would be dangerous and make the car
> leap off the road when it encountered a bump.  That's a laughable idea.
>
> Like Jack, I highly recommend the Spherebar mounts for the A-arms.  They
> really do smooth out the swaybar action on the suspension.  It's perhaps not
> as good as a true heim system, but it's probably 95% as good, without all
> the maintenance, complexities, inconvenience and cost of a true heim system.
>
> Mike