Kevin K2

... but the car will be a little directional in response with staggered settings:

1) single wheel 'joust rate' will be higher on the stiffer side, so hitting a bump on that side (vs the soft side) will be more harsh/upsetting, esp if that side is loaded in a corner.

2) in a steady corner, the end of car with staggered bar will drop lower a small amount if the stiff end is on the 'inside' of corner, and will rise if stiff end is at outside of corner.

these will be very small effects, but 1) may be noticable.

John/TSR

...doesn't know and doesn't care if one end of the bar is set one way, and the other some other way.

Normal adjustable sway bar technology: Fix one end to a point, put the adjuster on the other end. If you're using blade-type adjusters, it's too expensive (and pointless) to put them on both ends. You can't measure a difference in response, you can't feel it, you can only image it. Just imagine that there is no difference, because in reality, there isn't.

The bar should be free to rotate in the mounting blocks. If it's correctly mounted, it (and the chassis) couldn't care less if one end is set "soft", and the other end is set "hard". It's loaded in torsion, and that load is evenly distributed at both ends.

The only way to screw it up is if there is some pre-load at static, which in a street car is a bad thing. The circle track guys might set up some pre-load in the bars, but nobody else on earth does.

VAP

I've tried 'splainin to em John... some prefer fallacy to fact/myth to math/guesswork to geometry

Phil type 951

. is jacked off the ground or just sitting on the ground?? When the cars on the ground the bar has some weight on it.. but so did the stock one. I cant un bolt one side of the sway bar if the car is resting on the ground, its gotta be jacked up. is this an incorrect setting??

John/TSR

You should be able to remove one or both sway bar links when the car is sitting at 'static'. If you can't, you've preloaded the bar somehow and that can lead to some handling irregularities.

I don't know what bar you have, or if it has adjustable ends to bring it back to neutral at static, but this is very important. It's likely that, if it doesn't have an adjuster anywhere in the linkage, you are preloaded it by using different holes in the bar arms - each hole makes the bar end a different effective length - so the easy answer is "Don't do that".

Phil type 951

preload next week on the trackbut the car is handling great under the current set up so I don't know if I want to change it... what car handling characteristics are noticeable if there is excessive preload

John/TSR

...have more understeer/oversteer in one direction.

Phil type 951

uplink adjustment causing preload?

VAP

end-for-end and/or to its rotating axis. One piece sway bars are crudely made and not high-precision pieces. For close-tolerance precision you need the splined torsion bars with end links I mentioned in another post.

I've actually "sprung" (slightly tweaked) sway bars mounted on a car using long 'cheater bars' on their arms to get them perfectly aligned with each other or to allow an offset adjustment such as you're doing now without pre-loading the bar.

But since you're using adjustable end-link Heim joints you can simply increase/decrease the links length to accomplish the same thing. I'm using "fixed" steel end links from a 94-95 Audi Quattro 90S which are the exact same configuration steel ones that preceeded the plastic POS that's available now. The ones I'm using now are available thru salvage yards only as I've recently tried ordering their part #'s from Audi and gotten the lousy plastic ones instead. Six months to a year ago Audi would send me the good steel ones when I ordered them.