So, I've been reading Puhn's book, "How to Make Your Car Handle," and a few things caught my attention.
1. Fred loves sway bars. He says they are the most cost effective, best bang for the buck handling improvement you can make to a street car, without making big compromises in ride comfort. With this, I have to agree, even though the trend of late is everybody lowering their cars with uprated springs. "Modify your springs," says Puhn, "only if you have a specific reason to do so."
2. Another point Fred makes about swaybars: He quotes a test in which the rubber bushings were replaced by solid bushings, and the effectiveness of the .8" bar was then equal to that of a 1" bar in a conventional rubber mounting. Think about this. A 20.3mm bar was as effective as a 25.4mm bar. Now, when Fred says "solid," he doesn't mean polyurethane. He means metal to metal with grease fittings like you might see in a race application.
So my question to the panel is this:
How much stiffer is polyurethane than rubber? How much of a gain can we expect by just switching out our bushings? Or, how can we figure it out?
