Sway Bar Upgrade
Installation difficulty? Easy
Total time: ~1 hours
DISCUSSION:
In my quest to increase handling, I started replacing the rubber bushings found in the front and rear sway bars and the sway bar end links. I ordered all the bushings to do the job from Mazdatrix. The end link Polyurethane bushings were a disaster. (see the prior story!) And guess what? The sway bars didn’t start on the right foot either.
When I ordered the poly for the sway bars, the salesman from Mazdatrix asked what year RX-7 I had. I told him I had and 86 SE. He asked if I had the stock bars on and I said yes. He sent me the bushings I needed…Sort of… Turns out that my sway bars were not the stock 24mm in front and 14mm in rear. They were smaller! I guess the SE model had smaller sway bars than the GXL! So when I tried the bushings that I ordered, they didn’t fit and I ended up not using them when I installed the new end link bushings.
However about a month latter when I was at the junkyard gathering parts for my 4 to 5 bolt conversion, I found an 87 GXL that did have the larger sway bars that I needed to use the bushings I ordered. So for $10 a piece I brought them home and cleaned them up.
Now this might seem like a waste of time upgrading from stock to stock bars. But believe me it wasn’t. My original sway bars were almost 4mm smaller in the front and 2mm smaller than the rear bars that I brought home from the yard. Also the poly sway bar bushings that I bought were a lot tighter and fit great. Now I probably could have saved a lot of time if I would have just ordered an after market sway bar kit in the first place. These kits come with the right bushings but the only problem with that is that new sway bar kit generally runs in the $250-$350 range.
INSTALLATION:
Replacing the bushings on the sway bar is real easy. You don’t even have to take the bar off if you don’t want to. My case was different because I had new bars to install…
The front bar was a snap to remove and reinstall. It took longer to remove all the bolts from the splash shield under the engine than it did to install them. Just remember to use the silicone lubricant that comes with the poly bushings, otherwise the car is going to squeak a lot! The rear bar was a little harder only because you have to drop the exhaust in the rear to get the bar out.
RESULTS
Finally satisfaction! This was the last part of my suspension upgrade and I was very pleased with the results. The new bushings and larger sway bars improved the steering response and overall cornering ability of the car greatly. I find myself just taking the car out now for no reason other than to find some new roads to zip around. I’ve been driving this car for almost 8 years and during all that time I have never just taken the car out to do some spirited driving…until now! My neighbors hate me! For some reason they give me funny looks when I'm taking the corners in my subdivision at 45 miles an hour! (If they know what's good for them, they'll get out of the way!)