RE: The Cheapest Sway bar! (finally)

[Cheapass Ron <rapieper@yahoo.com>]

--- Patrick Bureau <pbureau@home.com> wrote:
> Hum... to find the materials now.... 

Steel superstore?  Ben has some links I think...got
ours from Central Steel and Wire (but remember I had a
contact there!)
 
> I noticed that the Michael abatzis version is round

Yes, I believe that is a Shine bar...

> (thus requiring
> additional hardware (read bushings) to make it hold
> in place properly,

It requires welding of square bosses onto a round bar
(2x) plus four machined pieces to hold that square
boss.  An observation of the Shine bar is that all the
stress is concentrated at the round/square joint,
making those two locations the weak spots - but it
appears to be significantly strong regardless. 

> I am wondering if a round bar with a plate
> arc-welded on the end would
> provide something stronger than the flat c shaped
> piece you used

Yes, that would be better...but one of our design
rules was to make this so anyone could do
it...everyone can't weld.  Nor does everyone have
access to a mill!  

AFA shapes, round tubing is best from strength/weight
perspective.  Square tubing is a neat alternative, but
there's not enough stock sizes, and you can't get high
strength square steel tube cheaply at all.  Plus,
drilling a hole through the tube would weaken it (same
as for a round bar) and the tube could very easily
crush under the torque.  We thought of square steel
inserts, but by then it was getting too complex and
our flexibility to change bars was reduces.  Solid
rectangular and hex bar are far too heavy, and we had
that weakening-through-drilling thing again.

We mulled over flat plate, T-shape, L-shape, and
settled on the u-channel for now...to change, we just
order what we'd like to play with, and we know our
bolt pattern.  The structural shapes are extremely
convenient to work with...cut, drill, and bolt.  And
the u-channel sits nicely under the car and is
basically invisible.

Some work on stresses indicates that our bar is
significantly lower stressed than the Shine bar (based
on our best guesses as to what it's dimensions are);
that makes up for the less-than-ideal shape (from an
engineering perspective) we chose.  But it does score
high on the cheapass scale!


=====
Ron (Cheapass)
'87 16V, ("Victor"), '93 Cabby ("Teufelhasen")
ICQ 108845455

"One....two....one...two...three..."
-Lynyrd Skynyrd

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