Here's the page where I talk about putting on a rear swaybar. A swaybar connects the left and right sides of the suspension, and tries to prevent the two sides from working independently of each other. What this ends up doing is trying to prevent the body from rolling on the suspension in a corner. This means the car corners flatter, so the contact patches remain more consistent.

There are two ways to prevent body roll. Stiffer springs, and bigger swaybars. Obviously, you can't solely depend on one or the other for roll resistance, so you need to find a balance between springs and swaybars. There are of course, many other factors, and I suggest that anyone who would like to know more on the subject read this article, check out the some of the things at the car suspension bible, read Going Faster by Carl Lopez, etc.

Back to my car.

The stock 93 L Legacy, as I mentioned, came with no rear swaybar. In fact, many cars don't have them. Having no rear sway makes the car more prone to what is called understeer, and therefore safer for the average driver. Not to mention it makes the car slightly less expensive to produce and probably isn't necessary in an average car.

Fortunately for me, there are plenty of other Subaru models that came equipped with rear swaybars from the factory, and there are plenty of aftermarket options as well. In order to keep costs down, I decided to once again adapt parts from other Subarus. The Legacy turbo sedan came with an 18mm rear swaybar. My front bar is 18mm. LS Legacies had a 16mm bar. Aftermarket bars are available in sized up to 24mm. There's no sense in going and throwing on huge bars for the sake of having them. They would make too drastic of a change, and after all, I already stiffened up the springs pretty significantly. The key to good handling is making small changes in one aspect while keeping all else constant, and when modifying swaybars, it's best to keep them pretty balanced. Throwing money and parts at a car with no real thought is just going to get you an expensive collection of parts.

A swaybar connects to the frame with mounting brackets, and to the lateral links with endlinks. Seeing as how my car had no rear swaybar, it didn't have the brackets or endlinks or mounting tabs on the lateral links required to install one, either. Shopping the classified forums on nasioc and legacycentral, I found a used swaybar for $50 shipped. It's a good price, even for a 12 year old bent up piece of steel. For comparison, an adjustable 20-22 mm Whiteline bar is $185 online. Yes, that would be nice, but upgrading the endlinks and mounting brackets is also recommended, and that runs about $300 per swaybar to do. Otherwise the stock stuff can break from the higher forces exerted by a bigger bar, plus, you wouldn't want to just thrown on a rear bar without any change to the front (and vice-versa).

The lateral links and endlinks I found for $40, used, out of a 99 Impreza. Even though it's a different car, they're the exact same things. Mounting brackets I think were about $15 out of a 03 WRX- Still no changes in that design either.

Here you can see my nice collection of parts waiting to go on the car:

Here's one of the lateral links sitting on the ground next to the stock part.

Unfortunately the old one didn't really want to come out. So I tried using fire:

That didn't work so I borrowed a saw-zall from my friend's dad and cut the bolt off. It was really my only choice because the bolt was fused to the bushing, and was never going to come out. I could probably do something to prevent that from happening again.

Here lies the defeated link. As you can see, the bushings are trashed.

I had to take the rod that connects the other end to the spindle to a shop to get what was left of the other bushing off.

Oh well, it's all better and they're on there now:

Yay, now I need to just put on the brackets and throw on the swaybars. Not so fast, apparently.

The holes were there for the mounts, but were all rusted. Not to mention there's very little room to work with on the other side because of the gas filler tube. After a few infuriating attempts to get the brackets on, I broke down and spent $35 on a tap and die set from Sears. After re-tapping the holes and taking off all the crap shrouding the filler tube, the brackets went on like the car was new and I installed the rear swaybar.

Here you can see how it's attached to the frame and the endlink:

I immediately went for a drive to see how it felt, and ended up going up to the top of Mount Wilson. The difference was incredible. The car suddenly felt much more solid, planted, and body roll was significantly reduced. Soon I will be getting the car aligned properly, and I'm very excited to see how it will handle once the full potential is available. As it is, the rear is very willing to rotate if I do the wrong thing. Fun, but it can be a little unsafe if you don't know how to correct, and it doesn't get you around a corner any faster. I've recently cranked the negative camber to the max all around, so Ineed to get an alignment to see where I'm at.