Friday, February 8, 2008

Connecting the anti-sway bar to the struts






My 914 has an after market anti-sway bar and this is what connects it to the strut on one side. The black stuff is a piece of 1/2" thick medium hard polyurethane. It is the same material that the torque tube bushings are made from. No-one had the bushings to replace the tired ones shown here. The other set were in worse shape. They looked like the originals since they had shoulders to isolate the metal parts. This rubbery polyurethane is difficult to work with, but it's what's needed here.



I used a 3/8" Forstner bit but I didn't drill it like this. I clamped the polyurethane between 2 pieces of wood, the top one having a 3/4" hole for drill.


After centering the piece, I clamped the top piece of wood down. The polyurethane is so rubbery it's anyone's guess what can happen if it's not clamped down before drilling. Accuracy here isn't too important. The bushings will be 1.5" in diameter so making 9 of them in this 6" x 6" piece of polyurethane will leave 1/2" of waste between each one.


With all the holes drilled the next step is to scribe the circles. I used a 3/8" rod and one of the washers from the assembly to guide an exacto knife. Nothing will write on this stuff. The only way to mark it is to cut it. But it would have been really tough trying to cut out the bushings with a knife.


I cut them into squares first and made a saw cut on each side to the scribe mark. It took me about 2 Hrs to cut out all 9.




Here's all the bushings and cut pieces of 3/8" ID gas line. The assembly on the right is how it goes together.


And here's the finished product!