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Old 09-14-2001, 12:21 PM
  #367  
Dave Kurschner
Tech Adept
 
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Posts: 215
Default Sway Bars, etc, all that good stuff

JeffC - About making your front swaybar (or any other swaybar for that matter). If you go down to your local semi-well-stocked hobby shop (especially one with planes), you should very easily be able to find what people have knick named "Piano Wire" in various sizes. It basically a piece of rod-stock steel wire that is in like a 2 or 3 foot long piece. Typically is should be under $1.00. Dubro is one company that has alot of the misc nuts, bolts, screws, etc, and they have it in that section of your LHS. If you already have an existing swaybar of a different thickness that fits your car, that makes things quite a bit easier for bending your own. If you do not, then you need to go back and forth between your car and the rod and "design" a bar that will fit and work properly. I'll assume that you have or can borrow a Standard MR4TC front swaybar (thickness doesn't matter at all). After you've gone and picked up your 0.081" (or whatever size you want) piano wire. Take for example, two decent pliers, put a single bend in your piano wire to match the angle of the bend in the existing sway bar on one side. Here's the tricky part. Now compare your work in progress to the existing bar and get that bend so it matches. Use like a marker or pen or something so that you can mark the postion of the second bend that you need to put in the bar. Now make the 2nd bend as close to matching the angle as well. But this is what is important. Cut the ends so the length is about the same as the original bar. Take the bar you have made and lay it on a flat surface (like a piece of glass, a tweak board, or something like that). Now see if ANY portion of your bar is in the air or if the bar "rocks" at all. You'll need to tweak the bends with your pliers so that the bar lays PERFECTLY Flat on that surface. Once it lays flat, and the angles match, you are good to go. If there is a "tweak" in the bar, so to will your car now have a tweak in it.

But there's one more thing you have to consider. A 0.081" swaybar will not fit into the holes of the nice blue Yokomo swaybar ballstuds that came with your car. The holes the bar is supposed to go through are now too small. I have found that the aluminum colored swaybar studs that come with the Yok GT-4 work perfectly. If you can get those, use them. If not, try checking out either Losi,HPI, or AE's various swaybar studs as they should have some that will fit a bar that size.
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