Last week, my car was making some clunking noises on the front passenger side and cornering felt wobbly. I drove it easy until I got home from work and checked it out – sure enough, the 25mm sway bar torqued down with poly bushings had snapped the puny stock endlinks. Bummer. I welded the old endlink together long enough to get to work and back the next day with a quick detour to the parts store. Bought an aftermarket endlink for $15 which was actually 1mm thicker than the old endlink, it looked stronger. So I got the car fixed but wasn’t satisfied. If that bar and my spirited cornering had snapped one endlink, who’s to say it won’t snap the other? Rather than buy another of the stouter-looking aftermarket endlinks, I decided to engineer my own and hopefully end up with a stronger, and stiffer, connection for the swaybar to the control arm.

Maybe this will help someone in a similar situation.

After a little research and some teasing mentions of MVP endlinks from years ago, I decided on a design: a female Heim joint rod end with a piece of all-thread and two locknuts to capture the sway bar. Pretty simple, really. I would have liked to use a ½” ultra-strength Heim joint but that would involve drilling out the holes on the control arm for a ½” bolt (didn’t want to do that) or using a reducer bushing. At the time I thought it would be near impossible to find a ready made bushing and I didn’t think I could machine one here with the modest tools I have – i.e. no lathe. So I decided to use 10mm components that would fit on the stock mounting bolt.

The only other thing I knew I needed to find was some bushings with a 10mm inner diameter. The stock endlink was much wider than the Heim link so I had to take up the extra space with something. Looking for 10mm ID bushings was futile but 5min. at the hardware store showed me that with very little sanding via a ¼” Dremel drum, a piece of ½”, 16ga. steel tubing would fit right over a 10mm bolt. So I assembled a parts list. Here’s what I came up with, along with part numbers and prices at McMaster-Carr:

M10 x 1.5 Heim joint rod end, part # 59935K74, $8.38 each x 2 = $16.76 total

1 meter Grade B7 threaded rod, part # 93325A190, $13.93 /3.3 = $4.20 per foot

25 Class 8 Locknuts, part # 93795A240, $4.52 per pack /25 = $0.18 per nut

36” Carbon steel tubing, part # 9220K462 $6.26 each /36 = $0.17 per inch

The total cost for the project was $41.47 plus shipping. I used only about a foot of the threaded rod, 6 locknuts, and 2” of the steel tubing so I calculated the cost of materials I actually used at $22.38 – that’s $11.19 per side, cheaper even than the aftermarket endlink I bought!

I wasn’t 100% sure that the Heim joints were strong enough for the application, but I think they will be fine. Over the long run, who knows, but for now they’re holding. They are rated at something like 5,100lbs. radial load and are self lubricating Aurora joints.

After measuring the stock endlinks and the Heim joint I calculated the difference at .8” so I made two .4” bushings for either side to keep the joint centered. Actually, because the .4” bushings were so hard to get on, I ended up making slightly smaller ones, more like .37” wide. A Rigid tubing cutter with a heavy duty wheel makes this bushing cutting a breeze! And a Dremel is a great short cut to widening the inside a couple hundredths of an inch. I heat blued the bushings after and would have polished them if I wasn’t feeling lazy at the time. I don’t expect to see much rust after heat bluing and grease.

Used a little red locktite on the Heim joint, hopefully that will dissuade it from coming apart.

Do they work? You bet! They feel just slightly more solid than the originals and were easier to put on because they bend in every direction. All in all this has been a great project and I hope my custom endlinks hold up to years of abuse. If not, I’m gonna upgrade to ½” ultra-strength endlinks with a radial load capacity of some 16,000lbs. The reducer bushing I thought would be impossible to find would be very simple to make with a tubing cutter and about $10 worth of chrome-moly tubing.

So there's my story, I wish I'd taken pictures of the process because in a case like this a picture really is worth 1000 words. Maybe later I can snap a few pics, but right now I'm (obviously) at work. Doing nothing...bored.......maybe it's time to design some more suspension components......... :)