Ok dont laugh... Here is my krestion... Can a fella heat and bend(a little) a sway bar to better fit the project without fully loosing its anti sway characteristics??
No you cant heat it, will loose the "spring" and bend when a load is placed on it. have to carefully cold bend it.
Sway bars are heat treated, when you heat it,you take the heat treat out of that area which will make it flex more then intended. Sorry
Agreed with above posters. Sway bars are spring steel, and will lose that tendency once heated. ---John
Unfortunately, it will not behave as it did before, once it has been heated. There may be a way to introduce "spring" back into it, but that falls under the "wizardry" part of your thread. ...Not my strong point.
not that it matters,but how much is a little? and where are you going to bend it? but stay away from heat.
Your question has different answers depending on what you are doing. I am the old HAMB metallurgist. I understand the wizardry part. Sway bars are generally heat treated. You want them to be high strength so they flex and do not have permanent deformation. Like a spring, the sway bar needs to be able to twist and spring back to orig shape. If you are just heating the ends a bit, probably be OK. Not so much forces in this area. Heating in the straight middle section or at the bends you will have potential problems. These are the areas with highest tensile forces. Even if you do heat at the problem areas, it will still work as a sway bar, but it could end up with a permanent set if you distort it far enough. Kind of like heated up springs to lower a car, they still can work, but are compromised. Assuming you have an easy to get sway bar, go ahead and try it, but beware you should have a stock one to keep around in case yours gets messed up. The best way is to heat and bend to your required shape. Then re-heat treat the entire bar. That way you are back to original properties.
If the heat is localized towards the ends, impact to the rest of it will be minimized. I say go for it. Bob
If you get the metal hot enough to soften it (so it will bend), you have altered the grain structure and it's no longer the same type of spring. UNLESS, you have it heat treated again.
I watched a guy heat and bend a sway bar in a shop that was rumored to be the best in the area. Twisted sway bars from the factory aren't/weren't uncommon on some cars. He did it because one of those cars was "jacking" weight, causing what appears to be an alignment issue. While that fixes the problem, as has been pointed out, it ruins the bar. If you could bend it cold that would be ok so long as that doesn't cause cracks. Check for cranks with Magnaflux or dye penetrant.
I'll say it depends on where - Pics would help a lot here too. I wouldn't recommend it between the frame bushings, but you probably could get away with very minimal ill effects if it was between the link end and the factory bend. I'm not recommending following what I'm about to say and let me preface this with it was an experiment to see what I could get away with on a REAR sway bar. Ok this was a rear sway bar on a truck, Retro fitted from a later model. It was too wide to fit but everything else was perfect with some goofy bends to clear quite a bit of stuff. My plan was to chop up that one and make a template to take back to the none yard and find one closer fitting. Somewhere along the line I decided to see if it would work modified. I can't remember exactly how much I cut out of it but it was about 4-6 inches. I made a 5" sleeve for the bar and made fish mouth notches in the sleeve. Cross drilled and pined the bar thru the sleeve , welded the pins & then welded the bar to the sleeve thru the fish mouths, no straight welds on the sway bar. I thought sure as shit this would be ok on the rear because of the way it works with a solid axle. So far there's 30k miles on it with no problems at the joint or how it works. It's still the same shape and hasn't bent.
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