Articles » Basic Mods Part 2

Moving on we come to more suspension improving hardware. Let’s look at tie bars first. The stock Civic Si comes with a front one. What the upper ones do is attach to your shock tower on both sides of the car. This prevents the to towers on from pinching in closer to each other in a hard turn. The body of the car naturally does this when taking a turn really fast because it doesn’t really have anything to prevent it. A tie bar does just this and improves the responsiveness of the car overall. There is also a lower tie bar that attaches in the rear to the lower control arms and keeps them from moving closer to/farther away from each other.

Farther down the list are your anti-sway bars. These attach to the lower control arms on each side of the car and serve to lower the amount of body roll the car experiences. This results in being able to take turns faster and remaining more stable at freeway speeds. You probably are wondering how it accomplishes this miracle of modern mechanics. Well, the anti-sway bar forms kind of a long flattened U shape. The two peaks of the U are what attach to the lower control arms and the bottom part of the U attaches to the chassis. When one control arm on one of the sides starts moving up (as would happen in a turn), it starts twisting that side of the bar up. Naturally, the bar isn’t going to like that and is going to try to match that on the other side, attempting to pull the other control arm up the same amount. This causes the car to "fall back" on the side on the inside of the turn. The car isn’t tall enough nor going fast enough to completely lift that side off the ground, so if it’s being lifted up, it’s going to keep the car more parallel to the ground.