Triumph Spitfire Anti-Sway Bar Disassembly

This is my 100th post. Nothing special, just thought I'd mention it. Maybe I should talk about something momentous, but nah.

Anyway, while playing with the steering rack I also decided to clean up the anti-sway bar from the '64. I pulled the old mounting rubber off and took a flap disk to it to clean up all the gunk.

All cleaned up. Hey where'd that beer come from?! I hope it was after 5pm! Good reason to not have a time stamp on my pics.

The removal of the links was a little tricky but they didn't fight me as much as I thought hey would. Both of them turned right out of the end of the bar, but I had to put the link in a vice to get the bolts of of the link itself.

Link removed. The ball end bolts the lower A-arm while the other screws into the anti-sway bar.

Where the link attaches.

Using the vice to help break away the stud in the link bushing. Not as bad as other bushing problems I've had, that's for sure!

Otherwise, there wasn't much else to it. There was one interesting find in that I think the thing is quite bent. So bent, as a matter of fact, that it may be no longer effective. I decided to pull the one of the '66 to see how that was. Turns out this one was bent, too, though not as bad.

It should be resting flat on the bench (and, yes, the bench is pretty level). The end rises about an inch from where it lays flat.

Of course, I didn't pay attention when I pulled it off the '64 but it seems as though the driver's side on the '66 was the bent part; probably the same on the '64, I figure. This stuff is spring steel so I think I can forget about being able to straighten it out, at least using the tools that I have here.

Interesting, though, that they are both bent in the same way, though not to the same extent. I posted about it on my favorite forum. It got quite a bit of play with discussion ranging from "it's just bent" to "they did that on purpose to account for the weight of the driver". Of course, this would assume that Triumph designed the car around the assumption that only one person would be in it AND that you would have different parts for both the left-hand drive and right-hand drive cars. The part numbers are the same.

Though I've come to believe that the bend is not intentional (otherwise I would expect the same "bent-ness" from both bars made only 2 years apart), I find it odd that all of the forces acting on the car during the need for anti-sway are focused right to that point and cause some 3/4" to 1" tempered steel to bend and NOT cause other deformations elsewhere in the car...or at least none that I could find. Like I said, interesting.

That's it. Here's to 100 posts. Maybe by about post 1283, the car will be done!