The Neuspeed rear sway Bar
The Neuspeed rear sway bar is a good upgrade for those wanting their car to handle
better. It replaces the factory rear sway bar which comes in different
sizes depending on whether your car has the sport suspension or not.
Neuspeed offers the bar in 2 sizes, 19mm and 22mm. I'd have to say a
majority of the people go with and recommend the 19mm size. The
22mm has been said to make the car to twitchy, over steer to much, or makes the rear end snap around on them
to easily. The
Neuspeed rear sway bar wasn't always a great option however, and it's still
without it's pitfalls. But if observant and can properly maintain it, it
is a great option.
When Neuspeed first released the rear sway bar some users had
issue with their subframes cracking. At that time, Neuspeed didn't include
any reinforcement brackets for the subframe. See the picture below of the
bracket they designed. Neuspeed started to issue these brackets to existing customers and
included it with all further orders. Unfortunately that did not cure the
problem. More time went by and I waited to see what would happen.
Sure enough, some people started having problems where their reinforcement
brackets would break. Neuspeed released an add on for the existing bracket
design. Greg Woo of Neuspeed emailed a letter out to all existing
customers regarding how to get the free upgrade. The letter is here if you
need it. The new bracket is shown below. With the new bracket design,
the setup is MUCH stronger, and I finally felt safe enough to do the upgrade.
The installation of it was fairly straightforward. You may want to glance at the below photos for reference though. The bracket could be confusing at first if you haven't seen it on the car. Installation would typically take about an hour. When connecting the sway bar to the uplinks you will notice there are 2 holes in the end of the sway bar. If you use the 2 inner holes, the bar will be on it's firm setting, the 2 outer will be soft, and you can do an inner and outer hole to get a medium setting. If you do the medium setting, some have recommended to use the drivers side inner hole and the passenger outter hole.
The
last thing you will want to watch out for is rubbing of the rear
driveshafts. At some point in time, Neuspeed manufactured the sway bar
either with a rounded off end or a squared off end. If you have the
squared off end, you may need to grind it down just a little to ensure it will
not rub on the driveshafts when the suspension compresses. See the picture
below for what I am referring to. The other problem is on some cars,
unfortunatley mine, the sway bar uplink can rub on the driveshaft. There
are few things you can do to try to remedy the problem though. You can set
the bar on firm or medium. For me it was just rubbing on one side so that
would be a viable fix. The other thing you can do is get uplinks from and older
A4 (96-97) or an Audi 90 Quattro (93-95). They had the same uplinks in the
rear, with the expection they were metal, opposed to plastic. Those metal
uplinks are also smaller in diameter, and in this writer's opinion, a little
stronger than the plastic ones.
The main problem is that the Neuspeed bar relocates
the uplink hole in relation to where the old uplink used to rest on the car. It
pushes the uplink forward some hence why mine rubbed on the driveshaft. What you
could do is this following: Get yourself some plate metal (cheap) and
place it between the subframe and the swaybar bushings (the red ones Neuspeed
sends) You would have to cut it down to size and drill 2 holes in it for bolts
to pass through. But what you are effectively doing is pushing the mounting for
the rear sway bar out further away from the car also bringing back the resting
point for the uplinks. That should be a cheap fix. Home depot (some of them
anyway) carry plate steel. You would also need longer nuts and bolts (4 of them)
for the mounting of the bushings since you have now spaced it out. But that
should fix it.
Some people have mentioned getting the SP custom
uplinks (shown below) to resolve the problem. While those may be more sturdy
than the plastic uplinks, I don't think that will fix the inherent issue. If you
notice the stock sway bar links, they are not straight up and down like the SP
links. They have a slight bend in it allowing clearance for the driveshaft. Now
it couldn't hurt to get these uplinks, but they are priced more than a used set
of Audi 90 metal uplinks, and they wont resolve the clearance issue.
Grind away area in red |
Uplink rubbing on driveshaft |
Driver side uplink & passenger side |
Close up of driver side uplink |
Notice in the below photos the distance of the uplink from
the driveshaft before and after the sway bar installation. You can see how
the resting point is now moved closer to the driveshaft. In the other pic
you can see someone else had issue with custom metal uplinks. They didn't
provide the clearance he
needed.
Stock sway bar with metal uplinks |
Neuspeed with metal uplinks |
Neuspeed with custom performance uplinks |
The final thing you need to watch out for is maitenance. Neuspeed recommends regreasing the bushing at least yearly. The bushings they inlcude are urethane unlike the factory rubber ones. Below are some pics of what happened to another fellow in an S4. He went over a year and didn't grease his bushings. He started to develop a mysterious clunk to find out his swaybar bushings and bar were being worn away. This car lived up north so was probably subject to a harsher climate then some cars. I would recommend checking the grease every 6 months to be on the safe side. Neuspeed does sell the grease seperately for around 50 cents a pack. They also said you could try using some marine grease.
Ammendum (posted on Audiworld)
As you may already know, the Neuspeed rear
sway bar has caused rubbing of the uplinks on the rear driveshafts. I proposed
one of 2 solutions. Replace the the current thick plastic uplinks with their
metal thinner predecessor found on 93-97 Quattros. Another solution is to put a
spacer between the subframe and the mounting for the sway bar. This will in turn
push the sway bar out a bit further from the car, also bringing the resting
point on the connection for the uplinks further away from the driveshafts.
Kirk Johnston emailed me to tell me he had took my idea and put it work. He had
some spacers made cheap and has been running it for about a week now without it
rubbing. I didn't get to making spacers yet for myself because I used the
metal uplinks and that solved my problem.
Here are the pics of what he made and some info on them.
"Hey Rob,
I gave up on trying to find the Audi 90Q uplinks and went and had two spacers
made. I got the idea from your website. I'll wait a few days to fully test out
my spacers before I make a post on AudiWorld. I think these spacers are going to
work well. I used ¼ inch or 6mm plate steel. I had a local metal shop cut and
drill them. I then gave the spacers a coat of black paint. I got some longer
bolts and new washers and locking nuts and everything bolted up perfectly. I now
have clearance between the stock uplink and the drive shaft.. It was really
quite simple to do and cheap at $10 for the spacers and another $2 for nuts
& bolts... so all in at $12CDN. Not bad. Now if these things actually work
and continue to work that will be perfect... I see no reason for these not to
continue to work.
Anyhow, I just wanted to thank you for the idea.
Kirk"