So 9 months ago I lowered the car with H&R Coilovers, upgraded to Hotchkis sway bars, and added Stern adjustable rear sway bar links. In this year, I put on approximately 5,000 miles, and in that 5,000 miles I’ve had the main bolt for the sway bar link break 4 times. Luckily, JHM is a great company and has gotten Stern to replace it every time for free, but the fact remains that I have had to change it out 4 times. This last time I had the car at 3Zero3 Motorsports and the replace the driver side one and I had my car back on Friday. By Monday, the passenger side had already broken. Has anybody had this problem? Is there something that could be causing this? Should I get rid of the these links and go with the links from 034 motorsports?
Stern’s initial endlink design commonly failed. I thought they had redesigned them but I guess not.
034’s should be better. I’ve never tried them myself but I haven’t read any posts about them failing.
Also, what setting are you for the rear sway bar? There’s two. One is more aggressive and one is less. If you’re on the one that’s less aggressive, switch to the more aggressive one. Puts less stress on the endlinks. If you’re already on the more aggressive setting, then you’re stuck with just going with better endlinks.
This.
I had some of the initial stern prototypes and I never broke one…I wasn’t exactly easy on them either. The amount of available travel in the lower spherical mount is limited (Think of it as an inverted cone on a 3-axis graph). The stiffer position on the hotchkis lines up well within that area under max/min compression of the suspension. The “softer” setting forces the lower mount to be at the edge of this range, which is constantly causing the system to bind. The weak link is the bolt. If you want to run the softer setting, the solution is an end link with a lower mount that has another 30deg of travel at each extreme…Or just run OEM links.
I had same problem and have now been running the OEM links with no issues
I saw koolade post about this on az a while back. Made the switch from less agressive to mosre aggressive position on the sway bar and haven’t had an broken end link since. Before that I had broken four I think.
+1 for solving a big headache. I couldn’t stand snapping those damn bolts and dealing with the clunk noise each time.
Thanks for the help guys. That sounds like it may be the problem. Which way is the more aggressive setting though? I can’t remember which was which.
Further back is less aggressive.
Edit: Just to give you some explanation. The “longer” and further back the sway bar is, the more flex it’ll have and therefore the “softer” it’ll be (and the more flex on the endlinks). It’s basically a lever system and the shorter the lever arm, the stiffer the bar.
I’ve been having problems of the end link bolts backing out on their own. Doesn’t matter how tight I tighten them or even If I use thread lock. That gets annoying too lol
Front end links?
Rears