Project Tundra, Getting More Cornering Power (and less stability control activation) with a Hellwig Adjustable Rear Antisway Bar
If you have been following Project Tundra, you know we have been struggling with excessive activation of our truck's stability and traction control systems. The improved power of our supercharged engine and additional traction of our larger tires have been driving the electronic nannys of the truck's OEM systems crazy. We were hopeful that a new adjustable rear antisway bar from Hellwig would help.
The result of our mods up to now is that the electronics have been activating way below the trucks maximum limits. This has been hampering the trucks limit handling performance with the electronics coming in way too soon in an effort to protect us from ourselves. The result was pretty irritating and frustrating when trying to drive rapidly. Of course we could simply turn everything off but the systems would default back on with every key cycle.
The constant activation of the stability, traction and electronic LSD controls was also prematurely wearing out the trucks brakes. Adding a real Auburn Gear limited slip, a Sequoia SUV front swaybar and adjusting the King Shocks had helped reduce the electronics activation considerably. Anything that reduced body roll and limited the amount of steering wheel input raised the activation threshold. With the mods we had added the response to the OEM systems was coming nearly acceptable.
We figured a little more roll stiffness and an additional reduction in understeer would result in great integration with the OEM systems and really make the trucks handling a lot better by reducing understeer and improving the balance. This would be good as the truck was getting pretty fun to drive!
To Read More about Project Tundra click here!
The Hellwig rear swaybar kit is very complete with everything you need to complete the install. All the components are powdercoated for corrosion resistance. The bushings are made of hard polyurethane.
The sway bar is three way adjustable by placing the endlinks into one of these three holes. The inner holes are stiffer, the outers have less roll stiffness. The powdercoating is thick and high quality.
The endlinks are adjustable as well to get the best angularity no matter how the bar is adjusted or how raised or lowered the truck might be within reason.
To install the Hellwig bar, we first removed the TRD bar we had originally installed. The TRD bar was very high quality but we wanted something stiffer and the option to tune the bar's stiffness was pretty nice for our future plans.
