[Guest]

This may be common knowledge to some of you but for me and others it could be valuable:

I have been searching for Herb Adams sway bars for my 96 Impala SS only to learn the Moroso no longer produces them (like since four years ago). Since I am looking for real performance I didn't feel the Hellwig or Hotchkis kits are satisfactory for my needs.

What I found is a company called, "HO Enterprises" in Rancho Cucamonga California (www.hoenterprises.com). They produce a rear sway bar identical to the HA rear. Their front sway bar is slightly firmer, yielding a less nuetral feel than the HA F/R set up. If any of you have read Scott Meullers articles on suspension, this sounds like a great set up. It will be my next mod.

Anybody already have these bars?

 

[Guest]

I had the HO bars on my car.
I switched to something less, I will tell later what they are if the experiment works.
I took them off because I put stiffer springs front and rear and added HAl shocks.
I just took them off yesterday.
They were great with stock springs and with Intrax springs.

 

[Guest]

Originally posted by Cheavy:
Common knowledge needs updating every now and then.

In the past few months, Tom Frederico's experimentation has yielded superior swaybars - and springs - for our cars. You can find them at B-Body Performance

In my opinion, there is no "superior" swaybar setup. It all comes down to how YOU want YOUR car to handle, neutral, over or understeer, and how much YOU want the body to roll...and how many supporting mods YOU want to do to your car (like aftermarket rear control arms...and if so, which price level).

To answer the original post though...BMR is making repro Herb Adams rear bars too...but I don't know anything about repro front bars.

 

[Guest]

Yeah, Mike is right, no such thing as a "superior" swaybar, unless you sell swaybars.

For what I want my car to do, I would not give up my Herb Adams bar for anything.

Mike

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the link to B-Bodyperformance. I haven't seen them before. Good info guys, thanks.

 

[Guest]

I have run the HO/HA setup and its great for track days. Even with my T2R, I found the car very neutral and forgiving on a road course. Autoxing it tends to oversteer. I just installed a set of the B-body Performance bars to see how they do. But I'm keeping the Herb Adams bars in case I want to go back. There are two drawbacks to using the larger HO bar in front. First, its difficult to fit wider wheels in front, they rub. Second, combined with GW front springs the ride is very harsh if you hit a pot hole, speed bump or rough pavement. The ride problem is a low speed event, at 100mph on the track it rides just fine.

 

[Guest]

... no such thing as a "superior" swaybar, unless you sell swaybars

It's obvious that the WX3/9C1+8X3 didn't have enough starch in their suspensions; more was clearly called for.

It's also obvious that you can go too stiff. Let your mind wander into a hypothetical:
When the frame becomes the softest part of the suspension, your spring/shock/swaybar combo is too stiff.

Frame sag does happen, but can be minimized/ put off by conscientious choices.

Ergo, the softest solutions that yield the desired handling targets will:</font>

• be more likely to yield an acceptable ride</font>
• be gentler on the frame, as well as the rest of the suspension in most cases</font>

I also felt it was noteworthy that Tom is perhaps the 1st guy to design stuff specifically for us. Prior, we had been using "other people's" stuff that was never imagined or designed for use on our cars.

The above is merely my opinion.
Chris Nickell of Rustic Racing is one very noteworthy person who disagrees with me, and has a lot more experience to back it up.

 

[Guest]

HO sway bars is old news..