Any advantages of going with a 25.4mm versus the 26mm from Robispec?

Depending on how your car is set up, 26mm could certainly be too stiff and counterproductive.

Any good suspension set-up reads for the CT9A?

I spoke w/ Robi at length. He did not recommend up-sizing the FSB beyond stock (confirmed by Mueller as well)

Robi did recommend his adjustable FSB end links & the fender brace along w/all his other Robi bits

Mueller noted that the larger bars have a tendency to lift the inside front wheel in tight, fast corners. Obviously, not a good thing on a AWD'r

Nice.

I wish this information was more readily available and common knowledge.

:crap:

https://www.evolutionm.net/forums/mo...k-my-math.html

It all depends on the rest of the setup. Just saying no upgraded FSB cause it "will" do something is a wrong approach. Instead of guessing what's going on, the info is out there to calculate a balanced setup. Get your N.F.s roughly set, then balance swaybars. Make adjustments from there.

And you can deviate from normal conventions when your car isn't normal. For instance the evo has a different suspension type and roll rates front/rear, plus its extremely front heavy. With this, I tend towards softer rear springs and heavier rear bar (from where I calculated, not vaguely).

All I have to say is math only gets you so far. Ha

I recently did a setup that didn't use swaybars front or rear and on paper it should have understeered with the spring rates I selected. It was wildly loose in the rear.

Threw the stock front bar back on and now it's fairly well balanced but it KILLED turn in response. Must find the balance between spring and swaybar to get the right balance of turn-in and overall handling nature.

Interesting...i did the ES front sway bar bushings ( stock bar ) as a single upgrade sometime in March 2013. No other changes......turn in felt different and car felt "heavy" in front. much more centered and less responsive at the same steering angle running straight or in corners. Effect felt more at slower speeds.

So the bar effect, despite not changing the bar, is different as the stiffer bushings cause the bar to work now at smaller suspension deflections.

At some point then I may try the RSB settings on my 25mm Progress bar on full stiff to see what that does....yes I understand it gives up total grip by sending some of the load to the front while the inside rear is on the ground... no matter

As noted by 03whitegsr above the feel on the road is important as well. And sometimes you cant change the driving style to suit the car.

Griceiv

Thanks for chiming in I couldnt find that in the "coff'-coff" search engine

glad i remembered it correctly :lol:

With only one broken and some extremely heavy use by Evolutionary etc i would say they are pretty safe. Bugs me that they are welded and nothing is noted in the construction though..I dont know of other bars that are welded....most are formed from one piece by heat and bending or forge/bending

The Tanabe is hollow though where all the others are solid bars. Completely different construction methods have to be used. Still surprised they are welded in the middle though as a CNC bender seems like it would have no trouble kicking out a 1-piece bar.

I'm surprised you broke one though griceiv, seems like with the type of spring rates you use, there would be less bar deflection?

Does anyone on this board use a suspension tuner or is it all trial and error? I understand that if you don't tune the suspension together, you'll be pushing off one problem (say, understeer) onto one part in an attempt to compensate for that problem and potentially add in an entirely new problem because the wrong part was added to the equation or adjusted incorrectly.

I was considering coilovers and eventually a RSB, but I have absolutely no idea how these particular parts are going to work as a system. I'm aware that suspension is not a simple bolt-and-go but I'm a bit ovewhelmed by my utter lack of knowledge surrounding this topic.

The forums are tough because I'm constantly running into conflicting information.

:dunno:

I want to step up from my OEM sway bars and my MR Bilsteins with Swift Spec-R springs at some point very soon, but I'm not sure the best way to approach this.

Any knowledge from suspension gurus would be welcome.

Actually, this post might need to be its own topic...

:lol:

"Conflicting information" might not really be conflicting. You have to recognize that they type of racing you are doing and the type of local tracks/events has a big impact on the suspension set up.

One guy might say "my car is perfect on 16k/20k springs and no rear swaybar" because his local events have fairly smooth surfaces. Another equally competitive car in a different region with rough surfaces might say "8k/10k springs and huge bars work perfect."

It's also subjective. While there might be an "ideal" suspension setup, if the driver isn't comfortable with that setup, it won't be the fastest for that driver.

Robi and Mueller are both “suspension tuners” though, so yes, they definitely exist. I think both have just moved on to other platforms as their main focus but I bet they both do EVOs constantly still.

:crap:

Well, I wasn't expecting a one size fits all solution, but I wish I knew were to start to get a good baseline.

:dunno:

Perhaps we just had a poor quality one but it did live a hard life with us. the bar bushing alignment was terrible, I could by eye see the two areas where the bushings sit were not anywhere near concentric (not even parallel really) and as a result would always push itself way off to the passenger side. So i think it was under a lot of lateral tension in addition to any suspension loads we were putting on it. I think the t-case tail shaft was smacking down on the bar when launching or something. the weld that failed was also pretty slim on penetration. a .120 wall tube had maybe .030 of penetration. Obviously they just butt welded it with no chamfer at all and then ground most of the weld off.

TL;DR- 3lbs weight savings wasn't worth the hassle for me.

Sounds like you did some decent post mortem on the bar. W/O a proper chamfer, that weld penetration would not really hold.
I am surprised about the misalignment you describe though and would expect that to have played a large part due to the constant misalignment stress vector.

Something else to check now if when i put a bigger bar in. :-)