Moral of this story is

When your only tool is a hammer (welder) then all your problems are nails (things that need welding).

Or

Old dogs cannot learn new tricks.

Or

"Cause that's the way we always dunnit".

But ultimately what it boils down to is this

"I dunno how a swaybar works, so I don't know how the forces are applied and therefore cannot comment cogently".

Sway bars in general typically have a few bushings in them. The bar mounts are a bushing of sort which will distort before transferring any load between sides. The end links, typically, on both ends have bushing/rubber as well. Loading will be in tension on one side and compression on the other during roll. In heave the bar is just along for the ride and rotates about the bar bushings.

This car really will not see 10/10 cornering at a high rate of speed, if I am pushing it, it'll be at an Autocross. Cones don't hurt too bad.


And yes, these bars are tubing, typical OEM is bar.





This does sum it up quite well. Change is scary and sway bars are wizardry.

I thought it was interesting that whomever did this Hot Rod article used epoxy for their front chassis stiffening components as well as the subframe connectors and most of the torque boxes.

http://www.hotrod.com/articles/dont-drop-hemi-4-chassis-mods/

During the production run of 3rd or fourth generation Camaros, the tooling was getting old and some parts turned out to be pretty flexible with just spotwelds. Spotwelds plus structural adhesive on the length opf the joints stiffened things up considerably.

Mention anything new and you ALWAYS get the doomsday sayers, "put it in the worst possible condition and it will fail." Green bearings are a great example. Yet, how many failures have actually been documented by Board members?

Those pieces see NO impact loads. First of all they are loaded in either tension or compression as they attach to the "frame". Second as Goody has mentioned there is a lot of rubber in the system. Third, if it DID fail "at 10/10ths in a corner' the suspension won't suddenly collapse, instead it'd allow more roll and probably put the car in an understeer condition, meaaning it would go straighter than it should. Adding more rear bar makes the rear end rotate out, oversteer, but removing rear bar makes the car front end not turn in enough. Not at all like the Jeep I saw on Interstate 70 yesterday lying on its side, one rear wheel sheared completely off.

In the same way I'd glue and screw a wood joint, I'd suggest gluing and screwing the bracket. The screws hold it together and aid in the clamping. The glue prevents the movement that "wallows out the holes".

R.

Unless you assembled the whole car with ever last accessory, you will likely run into this issue again of needing to modify an area that was pre-painted. Especially with the amount of fabrication in your build.

Whether or not the adhesive will work, its the bottom of the car. Install and weld as Hotchkis suggests. Use the opportunity to learn to blend new paint/clear into the old. You're a pretty creative person, it shouldn't be much for you to figure a paint blend. Ans its the bottom of a car, no one is going to see this.

its not the location as some would love to think


you gotta love all these experts
about a product they have never touched in their lives!
the one single person who responded in this thread with FIRST hand experience
said not to use it for the application.
that holds more weight to me then some stupid magazine article
and if you are screwing and gluing
that tells me you don't trust it yourself!

it costs a lot of money to build our rides
and i'm not rich enough to gamble it on the word of some stupid magazine article
that does no follow up on failures or has any clue of the longevity of this product or has done any real world testing.
its not a matter of embracing new technology
its a matter of not gambling on it
and being the guinea pig until its proven for the use.
at least this makes for some good winter reading
if nothing else..

fixed it for ya...:)

he was going to do what he wants to do but posted here in hope to find someone to tell him what he wanted to hear.

Does the OP have access to a welder? What's the problem with welding them? It's the bottom of the car. Weld them on, squirt some left over paint on them and call it good. I'm not sure what the big deal is here.

exactly.
and when he didn't get the answer he wanted
we get mocked as being old school
and not embracing technology..

Mocked?

Nope.

Just the facts.

Even the factory didn't weld them in. Why should he?

a few bolts would be just too easy..
then you have to think also
what if he wanted to take them off and move them in the future??

Well, I don't think I'd glue them on either, mostly because I have no hands on with it. He has experience with it and knows what to use to do it. So why not?

If no one ever did anything new we'd still be slime in a pond somewhere.

not taking sides here but i would think his car would stick to the road a lot better when he is finished with it then ever imagined when new.

Op is an engineer, lets crunch some numbers. Assuming just static loads for arguments sake, as in gigo. We know the lever arm length, we know the diameter (still puzzled over a solid bar vs a hallow bar ie wall thickness , we know the effective length, we know? maximum travel, we know in use temp of bond, we know/measure the glued surface area, both loaded in shear and tensile, some HP epoxies can achieve 14K psi tensile, and we can assume a perfect bond for starts, curious what the back of the napkin loading would be.

Before you sail off into the wild blue yonder, what's the loading in a stock setup?

No side loading to speak of.

No fore an aft loading to speak of.

No vertical loading to speak of.

No horizontal loading to speak of.

All the loading in a properly working sway bar setup is torsional and at the ends where they connect to the rear axle.

If there was enough loading at the frame mounts to stress a bond then the rubber bushings would be hammered out long before it stressed the bond.

The loading vertically will be equal to the load and direction seen at the end of each link I believe.

Think of our TB's up front, ie why a K member needs to be so beefy.

A couple things:

1) Goody, I think I'd strip any zinc plating off the inside of the bracket and get it down to a good prepped bare steel. I'm sure the bracket plating is good but I'd feel better with a properly prepped bare steel for the epoxy to grab.


2) Shut the naysayers up. Get me some of that adhesive. I'll load test it (instrumented to 10,000 lbs, max capacity 40,000 lbs) in the shop and post a video of the results. An incremental load test is quite different than an impact test but that is what I have available and will show a comparison of strength.

Aren't joints glued together stronger than the metal itself? Failure of the glued joint was away from the joint itself, somewhere in the base material.

And as said, it's sway bar mounts. If it fails, you won't die. You will learn something and have the opportunity to make it better. If you came here wanting to glue on your wheels and not use lug nuts, I'd call you a special kind of stupid.

The glue probably is or at least could be stronger than the base material...and I would consider that to be a requirement for this application.

I'm an mechanical engineer myself, and I used to work at a company that made the "body shops" where they did all the welding for OEM car sheetmetal. This was only about 6 years ago, we weren't seeing any of this other than for skins, hence my reply. So yeah, I don't deny that it could work. Is it cost effective? Probably not for a production car.

I'd also ask the same question here. Considering I already welded on the same type of brackets to my car with a really basic MIG welder in about 45 minutes and I bet I used less than $2 worth of wire and gas....and I know I can trust it...and if my weld cracked I could very easily repair it. Not sure what you'd do with adhesive with a partial failure.

The only issue I could really see is if you didn't get it clean enough for a good bond. So go ahead and try it, worst thing that could happen is it fails and causes understeer. Sub-100 RPN anyway. lol

He asked.
We responded, maybe not everything he wanted to hear.
He responded with his reasoning.
We debated, and still are. (Does that really surprise anyone that has been around Moparts?)
He will do what he was probably going to do in the first place.

So now, the question is, how much time must pass before this gets the stamp of success or failure? 6 months? A year? 5 years? His (or our) lifetime?

When do we get to say "I told you so!" or "Gee, I guess that really did work." Gene

4 years seems about right to me.