Sunday, April 12, 2009

Fixed the Camry sway bar

The headline says it all. My shop time was taken up replacing the rear sway bar on our 87 Toyota Camy station wagon.

Getting the old bar out was a snap. The only hard part was breaking loose the 14mm nuts on the links. My standard length open-end wrench could not generate sufficient torque. Fortunately the shop has a set of Snap-On extended length 12-point box wrenches, and one of those did the trick.

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The big challenge was installing the new bar. I suppose that removing things like the rear suspension mounting bracket and parts of the fuel tank would allow the bar to slip easily into position, but I was determined not to have a small job turn into a big one. After many attemts, starting from both sides, I ended up starting on the right. The key move was loosening the bolt that holds on the plastic fuel tank cover, on the right side. Pushing the bracket down gave just enough clearance to slip the end of the bar past the fuel tank mount.

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My one mistake was starting with the bar on the wrong side of the brake line. After it was in I realized that there was no way to slip the off-set end past the brake line, so I had to disconnect the line. That meant bleeding the brakes at the end, but very little air snuck in during the few seconds the line was separated.

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