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Sun Nov 07, 2004 11:11 pm

Is this very safe??

Independent Front Suspension

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The VW sedan is a natural for the independent front suspension. However, some engineer somewhere never went fishing, and never wanted to throw sand at some slow pickup truck on an offroad trail. Thus, there's a nasty little sway bar attached to the front end. This bar makes it so any wheel motion on one side is reflected on the other side. When you climb one wheel onto a rock, the other wheel goes up too. Bummer.

Tools needed:
- BFH (Big Funky Hammer, to you and me)

- Chisel (pick out the biggest baddest most disrespectable chisel you can find)

What to do:
Crawl under the front of your baja (well, not under, but kind-of-under) and see if there's a metal bar less than 1/2" diameter running the length of the bottom front beam. That's a sway bar. That's probably what's been making that horrible clanking noise in your front end, when you hit a bump and it bounces into your beam or pushbar.

Find the attachments on the lower trailing arms, left and right. There's probably two ea. metal wrappers around rubber bushings.

Using BFH and chisel, chop the metal retainers off. Don't be shy, nothing breakable is nearby.

(Optional method: At bottom of the metal jackets which hold the sway bar to the trailing arm, there is a coupler which ties the metal jackets. At one end of the coupler, there is a tine which is bent up. If you bend this tine down, you can take a hammer and a blade screw diver (OK, so you can use a chisel) and easily slide the coupler off (towards the back of the car) and the jacket is now loose and can be removed.)

Results:
Independent front suspension. Some may be concerned about the cornering ability of their baja when this is done. Myself, I never noticed! I only noticed that I could now run over rocks in a much better fashion, with less rock impacts on the front end.

Besides, it looks really cool when you park one wheel on the curb or parking block. Most vehicles can't do this, you know...!

Mon Nov 08, 2004 2:06 am

ask anyone with a street driven baja if it is safe; the answer is yes.
if you want to street out your bug and turn it into a racer then keep the sway bar, if you want off road fun it must go. the cool part is that you can remove it and then cut the straight portions up to make slip over sleeves that you weld onto the tie rods to strengthen them.
just what i have learned from books and such.

Mon Nov 08, 2004 10:23 am

major drawback is that you have more body roll in the turns. just dont fly around turns on pavement and you should be fine.

Wed Nov 10, 2004 6:25 am

ft_irwin_73baja wrote: ask anyone with a street driven baja if it is safe; the answer is yes.
if you want to street out your bug and turn it into a racer then keep the sway bar, if you want off road fun it must go. the cool part is that you can remove it and then cut the straight portions up to make slip over sleeves that you weld onto the tie rods to strengthen them.
just what i have learned from books and such.

I thought they were more "slip in" than "slip over".

Wed Nov 10, 2004 5:31 pm

slip in. 8)