For Anti Sway bars we got this excellent set of adjustable bars from Whiteline. The Whiteline bars are 24mm in diameter for the front bar and 20mm for the rear. This is up from the stock front 22 and 16mm rear. This is about 40% stiffer for the front bar and 140% stiffer for the rear bar by just diameter alone.
Both the front and rear bars have 4 adjusting holes which allow for about a 100% difference in stiffness from the front to rear holes to be dialed in. This alone has a huge impact on chassis balance. The bars are CNC bent to very accurate dimensions. I feel that adjustable bars are a huge tool, particularly for grassroots racers to tune their cars at the track. With no crew, it is not practical to change springs, but if you have a jack and jack stands you can adjust the bar and change the balance by a feelable amount in minutes! Even by yourself.
The Whiteline bars come with hardware to make them a direct bolt-on. Firm polyurethane bushings allow for more direct coupling of the bars to the suspension. We are not going to use some of these parts because the T3 parts have a bit more mounting flexibility.
It’s always a good idea to run fresh hub bearings on an old car like our AE86 and while we are in there, we decided to run T3’s billet hubs. They are machined from 6061 aluminum and are hard anodized for durability. They remove 4 lbs of rotating weight from the front of the car. The hubs come with new bearings and new races pre-pressed in. They also come with some cool billet dust caps. The hubs have the same face height as the OEM hubs so they will not affect wheel fitment even though they are thicker and stronger. The hubs come drilled with both a 4×114.3 for OEM bolt pattern wheels and the much more common nowadays 5×114.3 pattern.
You can order your hubs with standard-length 12×1.5 studs or with longer racing studs. We ordered ours with the long studs just in case we might want to run spacers one day.
8 comments
Kakkoii!!!
Speaking of electric power steering, why the EPS in many cars, even some performance cars are so numb? Some even feel like there’s excessive friction in the system that further muddy the steering feedback.
Not sure, you don’t have the torsion bar so it’s more direct.
Really is cool that T3 is doing what they’re doing to support a lot of old weird cars. 1st gen RX-7 lover here, which has much of the same design as the AE86, suspension-wise… actually an FB with a lot of T3 parts podiumed in E Production at the SCCA Runoffs a couple weekends ago, which is a nice testament to their stuff.
Does the AE86 do the same thing the FB does with unequal length rear links or did they do a better job there? Also be curious to see, given the opportunity to change things afforded by parts, where you’re choosing to put the instant centers in practice.
It has some different problems like a ton of roll steer and a crazy amount of anti squat so the car hops like basketballs even with the puny 4AG power.
God save us from OEMs with anti geometry.
Let’s hope for some regular updates.
Love the project and the updates! Im subbed on this for sure