Sway bar diameter for the road

[Dan260Z]

Just after some opinions on front and rear sway bar diameters for a mainly street driven 260z 2+2 with an RB.

 

It appears common to fit 24mm front and 22mm rear bars, however this appears to be a huge step up from stock?

 

According the the "stiffness factor" calculation in here http://www.autospeed.com/cms/article.html?&A=112694 going from the stock front bar of 18mm (?) to the 24mm would result in:

 

18mm:  104976

24mm:  331776

 

ie. more than 3x stiffer than the stock bar.

 

Is this a good idea?  I have no idea how "bad" the stock set up is -  After purchasing my zed I drove it for 2 days back in 2007 before taking the plates off.  Hence I can't remember how much body roll it had.

 

It'll be matched up with King "low" springs which I'll try to find a spring rate for soon.

 

So basically I was hoping for a cross-section of fellow zed-ers to tell me how their car feels with whichever combination of bars they have...

 

 

[Gordo]

I would go with the 18mm standard bars for the road. Spring rates will change the way the car feels on the road. ie stiffness. Sway bars will help with the body roll. But for a road car you won't generate enough corner speed to warrant the bigger bars.

[Riceburner]

I upgraded my sway bars early on. I run 23mm front and 18mm rear, I had that with low king springs and now with the coil overs and stiffer springs. On road it's good, a little rough due to the stiffness but I think that's the trade off. You can go to stiff springs but with our roads you get smashed.

 

Tyre profile will make a big difference too!

[Dan260Z]

Cheers guys.  I enjoy a good corner and have spent some time on the skid pan at deca, hope to do some track time in the future, etc and I've typically found most cars i've driven are a tad too rolly-polly for my liking.  But I didn't want to go too far and have detrimental effects on my zed's grip on typical aussie roads by making it too stiff.  I've got an opportunity to buy a 22mm front at a good price so it sounds like that might be the G-O.  Just wanted to make sure it wasn't going to be too small given how popular 24mm seems to be.  But it's starting to sound like a good compromise.

 

FWIW I have 16's with 245/45 Rear and 225/50 Front (fairly sticky eagle F1's). 

 

Nearly went with coilovers, except the engineer wanted the welds on the sectioned struts Xrayed if i'd gone that way, so it all worked out to be too much hassle (read: cost) for the sake of having ride height adjustment.  Hopefully the king lows aren't too stiff - they were fine in my old N13 Pulsar as a daily driver but who knows what sort of rate they'll be in the zed application.