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Stiffer springs or stiffer Sway bar ? Help

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Old 06-15-2009, 04:13 PM
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Dead_man
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Default Stiffer springs or stiffer Sway bar ? Help

I have Tein flex for my 350z with 12 kg spring rate.
I still have some body role which i hate
What should i do. Should i get stiffer springs or should i replace the factory sway bars to cusco sway bars.
What will be the better choice to get better handling and no body role.
Thanks for your help
Old 06-15-2009, 05:23 PM
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mcarther101
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About Sway Bars
No, these aren't the things that are bolted inside the car in case you turn it over - those are rollover cages. Anti-roll bars do precisely what their name implies - they combat the body roll of the 350Z on it's suspension as it takes corners. They're also known as stabilizer bars or anti sway bars. Almost all cars have them fitted as standard, but there is usually room for improvement. From the factory the 350Z's sway bars are biased towards ride comfort in order to serve the mass population. Stiffer aftermarket bars will increase the road-holding but you'll get reduced comfort because of it. It's a catch-22 situation. Fiddling with your roll stiffness distribution can make a car uncomfortable to ride in and extremely hard to handle if you get it wrong.

The anti-roll bar is usually connected to the front, lower edge of the bottom suspension joint. It passes through two pivot points under the chassis, usually on the subframe and is attached to the same point on the opposite suspension setup. Effectively, it joins the bottom of the suspension parts together. When you head into a corner, the car begins to roll out of the corner. For example, if you're cornering to the left, the car body rolls to the right. In doing this, it's compressing the suspension on the right hand side.

With a good anti-roll bar, as the lower part of the suspension moves upward relative to the car chassis, it transfers some of that movement to the same component on the other side. In effect, it tries to lift the left suspension component by the same amount. Because this isn't physically possible, the left suspension effectively becomes a fixed point and the anti-roll bar twists along its length because the other end is effectively anchored in place. It's this twisting that provides the resistance to the suspension movement.

This means that the suspension is effectively stiffened, but only when cornering. If you hit a bump in a straight line that lifts both wheels simultaneously, there's no twisting force as the wheels are doing what the swaybar is trying (and failing) to do in the above situation. This means that you can maintain a comfortable ride by running a softer spring, as the anti-roll bar augments the spring's resistance to compression only when turning....which is when you want it stiff.

As for the effect of stiffening one end of the car relative to the other, the stiffer you go the more that end of the car wants to "push". If you stiffen the front anti-roll bar more, the car will want to understeer more. Stiffen the rear more, and the car will oversteer. As such, some manufacturers will choose a swaybar that makes the car more neutral than the understeer-prone OEM.

While it seems like anti-roll bars are negative-free roll stiffening parts, that's not the case. You might be tempted just to leave the factory springs and use ultra-stiff swaybars to give yourself a comfortable ride along with flat cornering. Remember that an anti-roll bar connects the two sides of your suspension together, which means you lose suspension independence. And we all know that independent suspension is far better for ride and handling. What a stiff swaybar means is that bumps affecting only one side of the car get transferred to the other. Hit a pot hole in a straight line, and the car will be more likely to crash through it. One wheel drops into the hole, and instead of just the suspension on one side absorbing it both sides react. Hit a curb in the middle of a corner and you could lift a wheel.

If you run your front and rear swaybars too stiff, you may lose the ability to turn in and put power down. Your car will stop rolling onto its suspension, affecting your suspension geometry's ability to work. This means your tire cannot retain an optimal contact patch onto the road, as the engineers designed it. Net result is that the car feels too skatey.
-350z tech dot com

IMO, don't make your car too stiff, eliminating all body roll on a street car is probably a bad idea, especially if your roads have potholes and crap. Tein flex + aftermarket sways is a safe bet though, I doubt it's toooo extreme.

Last edited by mcarther101; 06-15-2009 at 05:28 PM.
Old 06-15-2009, 11:15 PM
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Dead_man
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What about stiffer springs 18kg up front and 16 kg in the rear with the factory sway bars ?
Old 06-16-2009, 09:58 AM
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Gsedan35
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Originally Posted by Dead_man
I have Tein flex for my 350z with 12 kg spring rate.
I still have some body role which i hate
What should i do. Should i get stiffer springs or should i replace the factory sway bars to cusco sway bars.
What will be the better choice to get better handling and no body role.
Thanks for your help
Originally Posted by Dead_man
What about stiffer springs 18kg up front and 16 kg in the rear with the factory sway bars ?
Let me say what you need to hear vs what you want to hear. Improved handling isn't as simple as more spring. Your talking about way too much spring stiffness for the street and even for the track it needs to be proven that it would be a benefit vs a liability. Furthermore your considering a spring stiffness your choosen coilover system cannot support without a revalve. And I'll argue that with the Flex's twintube design your already at the upper limit of what it can handle rate wise anyhow and any further push would likely be driven towards excessive rebound tuning and greater levels of internal pressure imbalances, which also detracts from grip and ride and drive quality.

I'll requote the following that I've posted here before,.........


What spring rates to run ultimately comes down the math being right AND proving the math with actualy testing. The following give's some insight to a winning Grand-Am teams testing on the 350Z in terms of spring rates.

The following quotes comes from a interview of the owner of Unitech Racing Jackson Stewart, the crew chief for the 350Z Grand-Am team Jeff Wisener and the owner of Perfomance Nissan, Michael Cronin.

SZM: "I noticed a trend that many Z owners are putting coil-over suspension systems on their cars, but you mentioned today on the track that many people are putting too stiff a suspensin and actually making the car handle less effectively. Is that true and can you comment on that again, please?"

Stewart: "Yes, it is absolutely true. Most of the aftermarket suspensions sold for the car are way too stiff. More often then not, for actual track performance, a lot of upgrades are hurting the performance of the car."

Cronin: "The common perception is you don't want a car to sway in turns, squat during acceleration, or dive during bracking, but those are things you need to have the car do to handle correctly."

SMZ: When setting up your race cars, did you use or try any of the common aftermarket suspension kits that are avaliable?"

Stewart: We looked at then in a sense that we wanted to know what was out there, but we also had gone through a range of springs on the car and if we went siffer, we lost performace. We have a range of a few poinds we use in the rear to make it oversteer or understeer. So if we see a spring someone is running on the street that is 50 percent stiffer *, they are losing overall performance."

* His use of the 50% number is a somewhat ironic number to toss out given that 314lbs upped 50% is 471lbs and yet they went with 525lbs or +67% in the front then Unitech did the R&D for the Truechoice 350Z coilover system and that setup uses 525/425 spring rates.

Same interview makes mention of the following,....
Future parts for sale:
Moton Club Sport suspension package

To comment on the above, they switched to a Koni 2822 4-way monotube setup
Old 06-27-2009, 01:47 PM
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danimaldaisy
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BE CAREFUL

I just found out that my lower control arm had ALL BLOWN BUSHINGS even though they LOOKED ok....this will make the sways feel like they are not working good and then you will end up trying to overcompensate by stiffening your struts up....

My lower control arm has 2 bad bushings.....the bushing that the strut attaches to is cracked on the bottom and sagging (WHY couldn't the nissan tech see that?????)

also the main bushing on the inner part of the lower control arm that connects to the chassis is separated and basically is in the same condition as a blown motor mount......but it is still in place.....i can literally twist the lower control arm left and right with little effort as if i was grabbing the end of a pipe and twisting it. The same exact problem on both sides of the car.

So HOW you may ask would this affect handling????? well the swaybar is connected directly to the lower control arm by an endlink, and the swaybar is NOT working because of this....and even if it is it is TOO LATE.....I need to replace these bushings in order to fix my problem.....

.
this problem showed up at 50kmiles and now i have 100k miles....

if you have weird swaybar problems or are confusing it with struts being blown just remember that in order for the sways to work....the bushings on the lower control arms need to be in good condition or replaced with something better in order for the swaybars to work correctly...

I believe my rear control arm bushings are just fine...and i replaced my endlinks 9 months ago.....GLAD i don't have to purchase a full blown coil over kit now only to be disappointed.....
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