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sway bars

4K views 3 replies 4 participants last post by  Stoogey 
#1 ·
sway bars are a good way of keeping ur tyres planted to the road when cornering, some of them have different thiknesses, not sure wat they do, but you could also try takin out the fron sway bar, sometimes it can actually be better


Cheers brad
 
#2 ·
Sway Bars help to eliminate Body Roll...which is the mass of the car rolling around the corner in stead of following the tyres path which in turn creates understeer/oversteer, taking the Front Sway Bar will increase oversteer and turn in...Rally Cars also do this to help turn in on dirt roads...
 
#4 ·
Nice read on sway bars.

http://rc411.com/pages/howto.php?howto=22&page=3

Article taken from http://users.pandora.be/elvo/

"Anti-roll bars are like 'sideways springs', they only work laterally. Here's how they work: if one side of the suspension is compressed, one end of the bar is lifted. The other end will also go up, pulling the other side of the suspension up also, basically giving more resistance to chassis roll. How far and how strongly the other side will be pulled up depends on the stiffness and the thickness of the bar used: a thin bar will flex a lot, so it won't pull the other side up very far, letting the chassis roll deeply into its suspension travel. Note that the bar only works when one side of the suspension is extended further than the other, like when the car is cornering. When both sides are equally far compressed, like when the car is braking, the bar has no effect. So anti-roll bars only affect the lateral balance of the car, not the longitudinal balance.
Unfortunately, anti-roll bars aren't the only things affecting the car's roll stiffness; they work in conjunction with the springs and dampers. Suppose you add an anti-roll bar at the rear of your car without changing any of the other settings. When the car enters a turn, the chassis starts to roll. Normally, the suspension on the outside of the turn would compress, and the one on the inside would extend, making for a lot more pressure on the outside tire. With the anti-roll bar however, the suspension on the inside will be compressed, so the chassis will roll less, and the rear of the car will sit lower than normal. So the rear has more weight on it, and it's distributed more evenly over the two tires. This makes for a little more, and more consistent traction. Remember that this is in the beginning of the turn, the situation is different in the middle of the turn. Normally, without the anti-roll bar, the chassis would stop rolling when the roll torque is fully absorbed by the outsid e spring. But with the anti-roll bar, some of that torque is absorbed by the anti-roll bar, and used to compress the inside suspension. So the outside suspension won't be compressed as much as it normally would, making the rear of the chassis sit up higher than normal, so less weight is on the rear of the car, and more at on the front. It's as if suddenly the rear has become stiffer, making for more steering and a little less rear traction. Rear traction is more consistent however, because the weight is distributed more evenly over the rear tires, unless the track is really bumpy, that is; anti-roll bars can really mess up a car's rough track handling, so they're rarely used on bumpy tracks. Adding an anti-roll bar at the front of the car has a similar, but opposite effect: it decreases steering, but makes it much smoother and more consistent. It can stop the front from 'biting into' the surface too much, making the turning radius big and smooth. This can come in handy on large, wide tracks.
Math-wise, the torsion stiffness of the middle part of the bar goes up with the fourth power of the bar's diameter, and for the two side parts, torsion stiffness goes up with the square of the diameter. Keep this in mind while changing anti-roll bars."
 
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