I installed my new 35mm hollow swaybar over the weekend + new rear endlinks and finally had a chance to drive it a bit yesterday! My friend is installing the same thing + the 22mm hollow rear hopefully within the next week or so as well. These were both ordered from Sam. No hwy speed driving yet, but in the city I already noticed a huge differance.

Installation

The install was straight forward, but not without a few minor hitches.
For anyone planning on doing this, make sure you have a breaker bar, some lube or, even better, a way of cutting off the old endlinks. My car had over 200,000km on it and my endlinks were brutally rusted up and this was the only time consuming part of the whole operation, getting the damn endlinks off.

Once we had all the old hardware off, we lubed up the new bushings and placed the new bar on the car. We then noticed the stock bushing bolts didnt fit the new brackets, they were just hair too small so i used a file to widen the bracket holes ever so slight. With just a few minutes of filing the stock bolts fit just fine back in the brackets. Next was the endlinks. We were not able to do this while the suspension was loaded, the car was on jacks which may have made the endlink part more difficult.

The endlinks were easy to put on, but I decided to get creative... I noticed the stock spacers were maybe .5"ish shorter than the new spacer bars. From what I read on the board, it would be ideal on a car lowered 1" to have the endlink spacers cut 1" shorter. So I opted to use the stock spacers with the new bushings in the endlink sincei couldnt cut the longer new spacers. Once they were in we checked for clearances by rolling the steering wheel all the way right and left. Unfortunatly, when turning the wheel all the way to the left (i think it was the left) the swaybar was making slight contact with the tie rod end bar . We decided to load up the front arm with the jack to see if it was only a condition when the supspension is fully hanging... nope. Was too close for comfort.

We then took the endlinks back off and put the spacers that came with the swaybar. When checking the clearances, it was just barely enough to squeeze by

The only other weird part of the install was tightening the endlinks. The instructions said tighten the endlinks to the bushings slightly deform. This seemed REALLY subjective, the bushings were very very hard to tell if they were deforming or not. We ended up torquing it down to what "felt" right (not too tight) and then measured how far down the nut was and repeated it on the other side. IF anyone has some suggestions on how tight these should have been other than looking for the bushings to bulge, please let me know!


Improvments

It was pouring rain the day of the install, BUT we took it out anyways. I noticed RIGHT away a big difference in the handling of the car. It seemed more responsive, even with the slow rain driving we were forced to do.

Yesterday it cleared up a bit and was able to whip it around corners like never before! The best way to describe it was that it just likes to be in turns now and feels soo much more controled at the sharp point of turn, way more predictable. My car already had stiffer springs, but i still noticed that it was much more flatter in the turns as well. The car was a blast to drive REALLY hard into turns!

I cant wait till my buddy gets his front and rears in, his car has stock springs and shocks at the moment in and should be an even more noticable differance!