DeTomaso Mailing List: April 2001, Message #8

Richard you do not want to torque/twist the bar to get it on.

Suggestions:

1) If you have adjustable shocks, first, be certain the your ride height is
adjusted to your liking.

2) If you wish to optimize your handling, now is the time to have your car
cornerweighted.  This will affect your ride height depending on the amount
of required adjustment.  Always cornerweight with the sway bar disconnected.
Else, the exercise was worthless.

3) After cornerweighting, position your new bar and confirm the side to side
alignment.  You will also notice that when the bar is mounted to one side
(the now higher of the two lower A-arms) that on the other side there will
be a space between the sphere bar mount and the lower A-arm mount.
Lets look at each misalignment:

Side to side - Get another bar or have your existing one rebent to fit.  You
will compromise the effectiveness and promote excessive wear on your new
spherebar with the misalighnment.

Height misalignment - It is tempting to simply tighten down the sphere ball
on the suspensions lower side since everything else lines up nicely.
However, when this is done, your car's cornerweighting is compromised.  For
my installation, I cut spacers out of plastic the shape of the base of the
spherebar  until the gap was filled.  Then using longer bolts, I mounted
spherebar with spacers to the A-arm.  Utilizing this methodology neither the
bar or the suspension is bound at desired ride height.

Good luck
JT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Barkley" <rbarkley@earthlink.net>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <detomaso@realbig.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 01, 2001 12:32 PM
Subject: Sway bar mounting/rear end asymmetry ???


> I'm trying to mount my new 1" hollow sway bar (with spherebar ends).
> With the bar mounted to the rear, the ends are seriously missaligned
> with the A-Arm sway bar mounting holes. On the right side, the bar looks
> to be about 1/4" forward, on the left it's about 3/4". Something
> (surprise?) is not square.
>
>
> Thinking it was the bar, I took it off. It is slightly asymmetric, but
> mostly right to left and only about 1/4". This is more of a centering
> issue. So I put a straight edge across the rear. The distance from the
> straight edge to the mounting holes is about 1/2" different left to
> right with the left being further back. This agrees with the sway bar
offsets.
>
> Is this typical? What to do? The most obvious solution is to attach the
> ends and then crank down on the rear end (center) mounts to draw the bar
> in. The problem with this is that on the left side, the mounts are off
> the ends of the studs so unless I can get a clamp around it to draw it
> down a bit, I can't even get started. BTW, jacking up the suspension
> (the car is up on blocks) doesn't help, in fact it makes things worse.
>
> Open to any suggestions.
>
> Richard Barkley