This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate
links, including eBay, Amazon, Skimlinks, and others.
It’s the tough dog adjustable bar. It’s super beefy, seems about twice as heavy as the OEM. The chrome color is a little obnoxious. It was pictured as black but shipped from Australia so Im not covering the return to sender lol.
@MTKID What length bolt did you replace it with? Think getting a brand new bolt in there will definitely be better than using the old worn out one. Also curious how the ride was after the install.
Man, I’m sorry. My fabricator has a pile of nuts and bolts from years of work, so he just sent me over to find a solution in his pile. Success for me. No help for you
Sorry.
Good to think about. I could drop it down to the lower hole. I’m planning on an aluminum panhard bar next, so I may drop it down when I do that. I’ll see if I can tell a difference.For those that have wider tire setups that come close to the fenders at full compression, I would keep an eye on the centering at full stuff. The stock position pretty much has the tires centered in the body at full stuff. Raising the link may bias the axle to the passenger side.
Thinking out loud and wondering if the lower hole might suit your setup better? Can't tell from the pics exactly but looks like it may be just level or upwards at the axle mount?
The stock setup has a slight downward panhard angle at about 1.5" height difference This can help on-road as that tends to be mostly compression travel.
Unless you're already thinking about more lift
Good to think about. I could drop it down to the lower hole. I’m planning on an aluminum panhard bar next, so I may drop it down when I do that. I’ll see if I can tell a difference.
And I’m always thinking about more lift
A flat bar position equals the furthest passenger side for the axle. Either compression or droop where the bar is not flat will equate to the axle moving to the driver side of vehicle. The axle side-to-side movement is in an arc with the radius being the length of the panhard bar and the center of the arc as the frame-mounted pivot point of the panhard bar. If I am thinking about it right. The idea is the panhard bar should be as flat as possible (at static ride height) and as long as possible to minimize the amount of side-to-side movement of the axle through the entirety of its vertical travel. This also assumes ride height is roughly neutral for compression and droop travel for higher speed driving.
High speed cornering and large lateral impacts will create high loads on the panhard bar and mounts. The new bracket will create higher moment forces on the OEM bracket where welded to the axle housing. Take a look at the photos for the new desert racing Lexus 600 and you can see they added additional reinforcing to the frame mount and an extra tube to the frame mount to make it survive. Now desert racing will have many situations where high-lateral loads will be present, likely much more so than a typically road or off-road vehicle.
Just ordered metal cloak duroflex joints and when they arrive, we’ll take a measurement with them in place to order the Wide Open Designs aluminum bar. It’s kind of a test run to familiarize myself with the process before ordering some lower links in the same manor. Rear uppers, I may do driver’s in aluminum and passenger in steel, since it will be bent to clear the fuel tank. Everything is uncertain until complete though, and I’m always open to input.
I was under the impression that for something with a fair amount of travel you’d actually want the bar slightly below level so that normal compression during driving still keeps it close to level, vs all compression movement being in the direction of the arc.. and more importantly, the further from horizontal we get the rate of lateral displacement increases dramatically.
