Sway bar 1970

[pco122]

Hi

I have been looking for a front standard 15 mm sway bar for my 1970 911T (to match a 15 mm on the rear) … but without luck. I found, however, a 16 mm front sway bar. My questions are:

- have any of you ever tried 16 mm on the front and 15 mm on the rear (for normal road use – standard torsion bars); what can I expect of such combination?

- an idea came into my mind: have the 16 mm bar cut to 15 mm. Then everything would match. But, thinking better, if the steel of the bar has some sort of surface treatment like temper cutting 1 mm would not be a clever thing to do since the stiffness would be considerably changed. The question is: does anyone know what kind of steel is used for these sway bars? Could I cut 1 mm without having the characteristics of the steel altered? I’m aware this is a difficult question, but anyway…

So here is my dilemma, that could easily be solved if any of you has a 15 mm sway bar to sell. Do you ?

Thanks

[Eric911S]

Hello: Just install the front bar and try it. The different diameter bar will not make any difference on the street. I have used many different diameter and makes of bars over the years and on street cars they really don't get used to the limit like they do on the track. I have a customer who has a race car that broke the rear mount halfway through a race in the rain and he said the car handled better in the last part of the race. He didn't even notice the broken mount till the race weekend was over and I pointed it out when he put it back on the trailer. Just try the bar and I'm sure it will work just fine. Thanks Eric

[jashford]

What he said.

[pco122]

Thanks Eric. I’m sure your right.

[pco122]

Another question. The front sway bar seems easy to install, but on the rear it looks more difficult. The bar is bolted or welded to the chassis? I can’t see any holes where the bar could be bolted.

Thanks

[HarryD]

There are at least two ways to mount a rear bar:

The Factory way-This has the main bar mounts welded to the tub and an attachment on each Banana Arm.



The Banana Arm Attachment looks like this:



The Weltmeister Way-You mount a set of main sway bar mounts over the torsion bar tubes and each end of the sway bar is attached to a modified adjustment eccentric on the springplates.

It looks like this:


The torsion Bar mount looks like this:



The eccentric mount looks like this:

[pco122]

Thanks Harry.

[Jeff Higgins]

Since you are working on an old T, I'll guess that you may run into the same trouble I did on the back of mine. My car did not have the welded-on body mounts, so I went with the clamp-on Weltmeisters that Harry shows. They have worked great over a couple of years use. That's the easy part.

You probably have the steel banana arms, and they probably don't have the mounting balls for the cups on top of the drop links. Mine didn't. What Harry shows as far as the Weltmeister set-up that replaces the front eccentric bolt on the spring plate works great. As long as you use their sway bar. If you want to use a stock bar, especially the early one, it pretty much has got to go to the banana arm. Here are some photos of what I did to mount up to mine.

A couple of heim joints, a couple of clevises, some threaded rod, and a couple of union nuts later and I had this home-made mount. I drilled through the dimple visible on the banana arm where the ball mount would go and ran the heim joint through that. I cut the ball cup off of the drop link and welded the union nut onto it. The threaded rod connects the clevis to the union nut. It's rock-solid, and it's adjustable. Hopefully the photos explain it.

[pco122]

Thanks Jeff for the helpful information.

[Richard]

The 16MM front bar will work great with a 15MM rear bar. It actually helps the car to understeer a little and counters some of the oversteer tendency 911's have due to the high amount of weight in the rear. If for some reason you are really hung up on getting a 15MM front bar PM me and I'll check my stuff. I may have one and if so I'll swap it for your 16MM front bar...but again...I think you'll be happy with the 16MM bar up front.
R.