Here is the link to the original article with pictures

http://www.stealthtdi.com/SwayBars.html

If you are too lazy to read the whole thing just scroll down to scotts comment and read it. The comment is a good summary for our car.

Here's a write up taken from the VWVortex that explains sway bar function quite spendidly. All credits go to Mr. Ian ("daemon42" on VWVortex), who had done one of the nicest write-ups I have ever read about sway bars. Here it is:

Image of Stree Prepared Scirocco tearing up the track. Normally, without a sway bar when the car corners the weight of the chassis shifts toward the outside of the turn compressing the springs on that side. The springs on the inside generally extend a little, or do nothing. Relative to the chassis itself, it appears that the outside suspension compresses and the inside doesn't.

A sway bar couples the suspensions on each side to each other, *AND* relative to the chassis. If you could put the car up on a lift and actually compress the suspension on one side by hand, then a sway bar makes the compression of one side also try to compress the suspension on the other. Okay... it's still not really obvious why that's useful. So I'll say the same thing a different way.

A sway bar effectively increases the spring rate on whichever side is compressed the MOST. If the sway bar were absolutely solid with no twist so there's a 100% coupling between each side, then an attempt to compress one spring actually becomes an attempt to compress both springs. It doubles the spring rate. If the bar has some twist, then it may only increase the spring rate by say 50% on whichever side is compressed the most.

So you're driving down the road and you go over a bump that goes across the entire lane. The sway bar does nothing. Both sides compress normally. You go around a corner and the chassis starts to lean and compress the outside suspension and now it's as though you have a bigger spring out there, so the car remains more level. That's the good part. Here's the bad part. You hit a bump with only one side, and it behaves the same way, as though you have a stiffer spring, so you feel uneven bumps more. You feel it crossing anything diagonally as well, such as coming into or out of a parking lot or driveway curb.

That's all the simple "How does a sway bar work?" part. The real tricky one is... "What does a sway bar do?"


Image of a stock Golf exhibiting excessive body roll in a turn.1. We know it keeps the car more level. So what? Limiting the lean of the body is good because it means that when you take a quick set into a turn, that the body isn't still moving sideways after the tires are at their limits. Otherwise you turn in quickly, the tires grip, then the body finally finishes leaning, when it stops, the tires lose grip. This is especially noticeable in most cars in the slalom where you lean one way then the other and so forth.

2. It limits camber changes. The camber is the angle that the tire leans in or out at the top relative to the chassis of the car. The camber directly impacts the angle at which the tire cross section meets the road and thus controls lateral grip. As the suspension compresses the camber angle generally changes relative to the chassis. With a normal McPherson strut that hasn't been lowered, the camber goes from positive to more negative as the lower A arm swings out straight, and then back to positive as it swings up. That swing up into positive camber is BAD. At that point the chassis is already leaned over so the tire may be starting to roll onto its sidewall. Changing the camber even more positive is just nasty. A big sway bar will prevent the body roll in the first place, and prevent the suspension compression on the outside which causes the positive camber change relative to the chassis.


Image of Trans Am in a corner.3. Transfer lateral grip from one end of the car to the other. This one is a real trick to understand, but racers exploit this EVERY time they go on the track. Their spring rates are often so high, the cars so low, and their suspension travel so little, that the whole camber and body lean problem is already a non-issue. The car doesn't lean much with 500 lb springs. They use their bars to change the balance of the car. Here are the simple rules first. A big bar on the front increases rear lateral and motive traction. A big bar on the rear increases front lateral and motive traction. The applications: If the car is understeering (pushing), decrease front bar size or increase rear bar size. This increases front lateral grip and decreases rear lateral grip giving the car a more neutral to oversteer feel. Reverse the process for too much oversteer. I mentioned motive grip. That's the neat one. Let's say your RWD car is handling okay. But every time you get into a corner hard and get on the gas the rear inside tire breaks loose and spins. You can't accelerate out of the turn. You can go around the turn quite quickly, but you can't accelerate out, and the guy with traction hooks up and passes you halfway down the next straight because he came out of the turn going 3-4mph faster. The reason you're losing the traction at the inside rear is usually because the rear bar is too big. As the rear outside suspension compresses, it's actually causing the rear inside suspension to compress as well (because the bar couples the sides... remember where we started). That decreases the weight on the rear inside tire. Decrease the size of the rear bar. That decouples the sides a bit, let's the inside tire press down on the road more, and thus not spin when you're on the gas.


Image of BMW carving a corner on three wheels. Here's where it gets really tricky: If decreasing the size of the rear bar doesn't help enough, the next thing you do is increase the size of the front bar. When the outside front compresses in a corner, it causes the inside front to compress and may actually lift that tire completely off the ground. The car is now sitting on 3 tires and guess where the weight that was on the inside front goes? Outside front? Some of it. The rest goes to the inside rear where we need more grip. The total weight of the car hasn't changed. It's just been redistributed, and a sway bar at one end, actually transferred weight to the other end of the car. The photo at the left shows it in action on a RWD car. See the inside front tire off the ground? That translates into more motive grip at the rear, and thus more acceleration. Believe me, that car rockets out of corners.


Image of a VW carving a corner on three wheels. All of this trickery applies to a FWD car too. Since the front tires share all of the motive AND most of lateral traction (because most of the weight is in front), all the things that happen with big bars at either end are even more extreme. A big front bar stabilizes the body lean more but also creates a lot more understeer, and may make the inside front tire spin madly under power in a corner. A big rear bar can't give you back much lateral grip up front, but it can give you back some motive traction. Basically letting you accelerate out of the turn, even when the front end is sliding pretty badly. Here's a big rear bar in action on a FWD car.

So that's it. How they work and what they do.


Scott's Comments: The write-up above, although taken from a Forum dominated by FWD cars, explains more about applying sway bars to RWD cars. In FWD cars, the key is to reduce understeer and increase motive traction. Many popular suspension kits come with huge front AND rear sway bars. The car stays level and the ride is tight. Turn-in, or the car's ability to resist understeer, is improved. But the inside front wheel will still spin while accelerating out of a turn unless you've invested big bucks into a torque-biasing differential. Leaving the front bar stock and increasing only the rear bar allows the front wheels to articulate normally. As written above, the weight that's not sitting on the suspended inside rear wheel is now being applied to the inside front wheel, which is not being unloaded by a huge front bar and is now able to extend to the ground for more traction. Make sense?

So I guess what I got out of it is for now only put a rear bar on until quaife comes out with something to change our differential.

 

very very nice. sure u can put jast a rear bar on,...but you could also put on front bar with a much much larger rear bar.

 

so if i just put a rear bar on it would be the same if not better than a front and back? is that what this is saying?

 

i think that's what he's getting at ^

as the 06 acura RL has the torque/turn sensing rear outer wheel acceleration, we need to allow the inner front wheel to 'slow' on its own to compensate -- and do so w/o over doing the sway bar because it needs the sway to compensate...

i think..

 

sway bars have 2 porposes

1) establish neutal handling
2) reduce body lean in hard cornering

if you decide to just put a right sized rear bar, it possible to create relatively neutral handling.
The problem is that, sure your handling is neutral, but your car still sways too much. This creates a problem, because you wont be able to take quick corners as fast because the car's body will still be trying to transfer its weight from the last corner. The best way to fix that is by having both front and rear bars.

i hope this made sence i didnt check my writing