Sway Bar yes or no

I8NEMO said
Talked to Hotchkis, guy's been around the block, his brother has a 68 Barracuda with the HSS 22385F front sway bar but factory LCA's. He did say that if the QA! LCA mount tabs are within about 1/2" of where they need to be, the connector rods can make up some difference makes sense. 72bluNblu sounds like he's on this and pretty sure, I'm leaning towards ordering direct from Hotchkis, they're 1 state away, $311 vs $327 ish from Summit. Units are back ordered, Summit needs a bunch but private sales unofficially take some precedence, could ship by end of the month. Decisions Decisions

Awesome, I didn't mean to question your experience here in fact I have the HSS 22385F queued up and ready to purchase direct from Hotchkis when I saw your reply. As much as I hate rabbit holes I'm awfully good at creating them, I was out in the shop, with tires on the ground I dropped 1/2" all thread through to mount tabs to floor kinda squared them and measured "eye to eye", gave me something to do. lol. Hotchkis direct is good for me, 1 state away, they are on B.O. but the guy said single parties take precedence over larger distributor orders to a degree I know Summit BO'd a bunch so looks like end of month I may have it. Much appreciate your help

No worries man, I'm just trying to help.

I just get frustrated by the lack of imagination of some people, and if you look at the other thread you can see that this has been brought up before with the same naysayers. The LCA is less than 13" long pivot to ball joint, and it has quite a few visual markers to identify locations that are the same on ALL of the LCA's. Not to mention, only a few places that are actually large enough and far enough away from the strut rods and adjuster holes to mount a sway bar tab. So you can literally just look at the LCA, look at the pictures in the instructions from Hotchkis, Hellwig, etc , and realize that the tabs are less than a 1/2" from where QA1 tabs are laterally. They have to be, because in that central tab location if the tabs move a 1/2" outboard they'll hit the strut rod, and if they move a 1/2" inboard they'll interfere with the torsion bar adjuster hole. They can't be off by that much. The QA1's look different because of their tubular construction, but the torsion bar adjusters and strut rods are in the same exact place.

The other thing is sway bar end links use large bushings. They provide for a ton of misalignment. Yes, in theory all of it needs to be at perfect right angles and parallel. But sway bar end link locations are not a precision deal. If you look at aftermarket sway bars on these cars even the ones that are being used in their intended application are rarely perfect. In fact, some of them (like the addco) are frequently more out of shape than what you get using the QA1's. It's so close I would happily wager it's within the factory tolerances for the sway bar tab locations, so I really do not understand the argument that those bars won't work with the QA1. From QA1 I understand it, they're trying to sell more K frames and limit any liability/complaints. But from everyone else I don't get it. It's clear it works just fine.

dano said
And if you look at my picture they don't sit the bar very parallel to the body. I hate the way its lines up but if I bring it parallel, the eyes are off. I even tried to put the bar int eh stock location and that moved it too far forward. I might look into the Hotchkis bar.

Yeah the addco's work, but it's clear that the cheaper price comes at the expense of quality. Especially in the mounting hardware. The Hotchkis and Hellwig bars are expensive, but have much better quality and fit.