Safe to drive without front swaybar?
 

Is it safe to drive without having my front swaybar hooked up? I'm waiting for my end links to come in but they wont be here for another 3 days..

Drag racers do it all the time..... just dont go fast around any turns.

Front sway bar?? you must not have a big enough turbo.

Not sure how a turbo is related to a swaybar :uh:

Can I get it aligned without it as well?

Yeah you should be fine, i have a bunch of drag friends that drive around with out them, BUT IM WARNING YOU. go SLOW around corners.



Heres a nice little write up for ya:


How sway bars work, and why people use them.
Here's how a sway bar works.

Normally, without a sway bar when the car corners the weight of the chassis
shifts toward the outside of the turn compressing the springs on that side. The
springs on the inside generally extend a little, or do nothing. Relatively to the
chassis itself, it appears that the outside suspension compresses and the inside doesn't.

A sway bar couples the suspensions on each side to each other, *AND* relative
to the chassis. If you could put the car up on a lift and actually compress
the suspension on one side by hand, then a sway bar makes the compression of one
side also try to compress the suspension on the other. Ok.. it's still not
really obvious why that's useful so I'll say the same thing a different way.

A sway bar effectively increases the spring rate on whichever side
is compressed the MOST. If the sway bar were absolutely solid with no
twist so there's a 100% coupling between each side then
an attempt to compress one spring actually becomes an attempt to
compress both springs. It doubles the spring rate. If the bar has some
twist, then it may only increase the spring rate by say 50% on whichever side
is compressed the most.

So you're driving down the road and you go over
a bump that goes across the entire lane. The sway bar
does nothing. Both sides compress normally. You go around a
corner and the chassis starts to lean and compress the outside
suspension and now it's as though you have a bigger spring
out there, so the car remains more level. That's the good part.
Here's the bad part. You hit a bump with only one side, and it
behaves the same way, as though you have a stiffer spring,
so you feel uneven bumps more. You feel it crossing anything
diagonally as well, such as coming into or out of a parking lot
or driveway curb.

That's all the simple "How does a sway bar work?" part.
The real tricky one is.. "What does a sway bar do?"
1. We know it keeps the car more level. So what? Limiting the lean of
the body is good because it means that when you take a quick set into
a turn, that the body isn't still moving sideways after the tires at their
limits. Otherwise you turn in quickly, the tires grip, then the body finally finishes
leaning, when it stops, the tires loose grip. This is especially noticable in most
cars in the slalom where you lean one way then the other and so forth.

2. It limits camber changes. The camber is the angle that the tire leans in or out at the top
relative to the chassis of the car. The camber directly impacts the angle at which the tire
cross section meets the road and thus controls lateral grip. As the suspension compresses
the camber angle generally changes relative to the chassis. With a normal Macpherson
strut that hasn't been lowered, the camber goes from positive to more negative as the
lower A arm swings out straight, and then back to positive as it swings up. That swing
up into positive camber is BAD. At that point the chassis is already leaned over so the
tire may be starting to roll onto its sidewall. Changing the camber even more positive
just just nasty. A big sway bar will prevent the body roll in the first place, and
prevent the suspension compression on the outside which causes the positive camber
change relative to the chassis.

3. Transfer lateral grip from one end of the car to the other.
This one is a real trick to understand, but racers exploit this EVERY time they go
on the track. Their spring rates are often so high, the cars so low, and their
suspension travel so little, that the whole camber and body lean problem is already
a non-issue. The car doesn't lean much with 500 lb springs. They use their bars
to change the balance of the car. Here's the simple rules first.
A big bar on the front, increases rear lateral and motive traction.
A big bar on the rear, increases front lateral and motive traction.
The applications. If the car is understeering, decrease front bar size, or increase
rear bar size. This increases front lateral grip and decreases rear lateral grip
giving the car a more neutral to oversteer feel. Reverse the process for
too much oversteer.
I mentioned motive grip. That's the neat one. Let's say your RWD car is handling ok, but
everytime you get into a corner hard and get on the gas the rear inside tire breaks loose
and spins. You can't accelerate out of the turn. You can go around the turn quite
quickly, but you can't accelerate out, and the guy with traction hooks up and
passes you halfway down the next straight because he came out of the turn going 3-4mph faster.
The reason you're losing the traction at the inside rear, is usually because the rear bar is too big.
As the rear outside suspension compresses, it's actually causing the rear inside suspension to
compress as well (because the bar couples the sides.. remember where we started), and that
decreases the weight on the rear inside tire.
First thing. Decrease size of rear bar. That decouples the sides a bit, let's the inside tire press
down on the road more and thus not spin when you're on the gas.

Here's where it gets really tricky.
If decreasing the size of the rear bar doesn't help enough the next thing you do is
increase the size of the front bar. When the outside front compresses in a corner, it
causes the inside front to compress and may actually lift that tire completely off the
ground. The car is now sitting on 3 tires and guess where the weight that was on
the inside front goes? Outside front? Some of it. The rest goes to the inside rear
where we need more grip. The total weight of the car hasn't changed. It's just been
redistributed, and a sway bar at one end, actually transfered weight to the other
end of the car.

Tried it with my 6" lifted LX450. NOOOOT recommended. I barely made it out my driveway, (400ft), before I turned around and aborted the idea. Likely not as big a deal with an SC. But I would try it first very slow and in a quiet area. If you have to make an evasive maneuver, all bets are off.

Yeah for real, i wouldnt recommend Daily driving it like that

Alright well I've got some coils on there now so it's pretty stiff, I'll be making a back and forth trip, pretty much all freeway and I'll have my end links after that.

Am I able to get an alignment now or should I wait till I have the swaybar bolted up?

i think you should wait till you have the swaybar bolted up to get an alignment..

generally you need an alignment after any modifications to your suspension..



i'm not an expert though.

are you guys serious. youre almost comparing driving without a sway bar to driving with a lit stick of dynamite in the car.

its not that big of a deal. when you set up your suspension and corner weigh the car you actually want the sway bars disconnected. if you have one of the front coilovers lower then the other side it will actually pull the other one down a bit too, thus not giving you an accurate height reading.

i drove without my rear swap bar for the whole winter. it was cold and i didnt care. the car was actually a lot grippier and didnt want to kick out at all....sucked for sliding.

front sway bar can be felt more then the rear but it is still not as big of a deal as people make it out to be.

and you the guy comparing a lifter LX450 to an sc on coilovers. wtf are you talking about? its day and night. at least if you give advice or suggestion compare apples to apples.

my friends wrangler does handle like 5hit compared to my car. then again he has 9" lift and 35's and im slammed with pretty much everything replaced in the suspension. not a fair comparison is it ;)

your alignment has nothing to do with you sway bars. front or rear.

That's what I thought.. I don't think my old focus even had swaybars..

I'm actually in the same boat, I was putting in some Supra sways and saw the decrepit state of my endlinks. Thankfully I found a set of moog endlinks at a local advance auto, and they'll have them in tomorrow. I am looking forward to taking off my sway bar when I go to the track, however. As long as you don't have any seriously bumpy roads or tight fast turns, you should be fine.

+1, you have a great sense of humor:thumbup:

Ding ding ding. I had an endlink go south on me when I was doing my CA bushings. Instead of waiting for it to snap mid-turn (it was way f***ed), we just cut it off with a torch. Since the sides are no longer connected, I effectively have no front sway, don't miss it. Going to wait a few more paychecks until I get new ones. Not that big a deal. Does make a difference, but not night and day.

:thumbup:

-Dan

Were talking about the ones that go over the top of the engine and attach to the coilover tops right? Thats what I ment if that makes a little more sence.