well, i finally grew ***** and started to do this on my own. i called my uncle up, who restores cars and has a well equiped garage with a lift. i ordered all my parts(1062 dollars worth of suspension stuff) and got to tearing things apart. anyway, right now i'm in the middle of it all(lol, i could have easly finished in a day, but.... i ran into problems like needing new front brakes, and needing bushings pushed in)... anyway, these are the parts i ordered

i got spohn's front sway bar, KYB GR2 front and rear shocks, moog front and rear springs, UMI LCA's and PHB, spohn sub frame connectors, poly bushings for my front A-arms and poly bushings for my rear sway bar. i also got new nuts and bolts for everything, and new tie rods and ball joints.

while its all apart, i'm cleaning and stripping my old rear sway bar and front a-arms and painting them.

i wanted to take lots of before pictures, but i forgot my camera that day. i do have pictures of my parts(all but the UMI stuff, still hasn't come).



there's most of it.

also, like i said, as i started to pull stuff apart, we saw that my front brake lines where bad, and my calibers were bad, and i needed new pads. i wanted really badly to buy better front brakes, and i have the money.... i just couldn't justify though spending all the money. maybe one day in the far future i will. i'm already going to go well over 1500 dollars by the time i'm done this all. so anyway, i went out and bought the stock calibers and stuff.



i'll have lots of after pictures and pictures as i put it all back together. it should be done by sunday, if not well before that. this was deffinitly something fun to do, and probably saved me a HUGE amount of cash on labor(i can't imagen how they'd *** rape me on labor for the front brakes....... seeing how they needed to be replaced). i will have to take the car somewhere to get the subframes welded in, and for an alignment and things, but, everything else will be done by me.

anyway, what do you guys think so far of the parts and stuff? lol, i'm just excited to be doing this all on my own. i'll deffinitly be posting alot more pictures as i go.

 

oh, i forgot to mention something i found odd as i did all of this. does anyone know what size rear sway bar came on a stock 88 iroc? i thought that iroc's had 19mm rear sway bars, and that the 1LE iroc's and z28's and things had 21mm rear sway bars. so, when i orderd the bushings and end rods for the rear bar, i ordered 19 mm. i got them, and i found that they were WAY to small. i messured the old bushings, they were 23 mm bushings. i was kinda confused about that, wondering how a 23 mm rear sway bar got on my car. it looks like its as old as the rest of the orginal suspension too.

 

Don't have the numbers to hand, but 19mm is unlikely to be the size for an iroc. 23mm sounds a lot more likely for a rear iroc bar.

I would be very interested to know if the swaybar you got for the front fits, given that you have an iroc. Spohn's bar did not fit on my 85 iroc. The problem was two fold. Firstly it hit the iroc wonderbar, solution is either spacers (available from TDS I think) to get the swaybar away from the wonderbar, or get spohn's wonderbar.

Also the overall width of the bar was wrong. If you have the original iroc swaybar, compare the distance between the endlink holes on both bars. mine were out by something like 1.5"!!!

Si.

 

oh, i forgot to mention something i found odd as i did all of this. does anyone know what size rear sway bar came on a stock 88 iroc? i thought that iroc's had 19mm rear sway bars, and that the 1LE iroc's and z28's and things had 21mm rear sway bars. so, when i orderd the bushings and end rods for the rear bar, i ordered 19 mm. i got them, and i found that they were WAY to small. i messured the old bushings, they were 23 mm bushings. i was kinda confused about that, wondering how a 23 mm rear sway bar got on my car. it looks like its as old as the rest of the orginal suspension too.

 

i really don't know. i haven't looked at the front sway bar yet.

if the holes on the sway bar don't line up, then what did you do to get them to line up? i mean i'm hoping mine fits, but if it doesn't how do i fix that?

mines an 88 iroc, maybe it will fit better... idk. i hope so. if not i'll close my eyes and pretend it does... lol.

 

What I did was to put it to the side and try and ignore the money I wasted on it. Steve Spohn didn't seem that interested in the problem. I'll probably put it on ebay or something to try and get rid of it, as it isn't worth the cost of postage back to spohn. What really annoyed me was the time I wasted trying to get it to fit. Hope you have more luck with it.

Si.

 

1.5" per side or total?

Also, I'm not trying to argue with you, but who says the factory end link placement is optimal?

 

1.5" total. problem is that the end of the sway bar was so far out that it hit the bottom of the strut, on full lock. And I need to be able to go from full lock one way to full lock the other, which was causing the swaybar to be pushed from one side to the other in its bushings, damaging the struts each time.

I've attached a pic of the spohn bar compared to an iroc bar.

And yes I verified that it was a Spohn thirdgen bar, and was not outwith their specs. Just that their specs are not correct for my 85 iroc.

Si.