maybe I just have a complete inability to grasp your description, or something, but it doesn't make any sense.

What would be the point of preventing a wheel from lifting if it does not also act on the chassis/body in some way? It seems that the opposite of what you are saying would be true. if the rear sway bar is only meant to keep the wheel from lifting off the ground, wouldn't the only way to do that be by acting on the body in an opposite direction of force from the lean generated by the turn?

The axle doesn't need a bar to keep the wheel from lifting, if anything the bar will encourage the wheel to lift. If the bar wasn't there then there would be nothing to prevent the wheel from lifting and you'd lose a rear spring on the kj in a sharp enough turn with enough body roll. My understanding is that the whole point of a sway bar is to try and keep the wheels on an even plane with the chassis/body of the vehicle. When a car enters a curve it wants to lean toward the outside of the curve. In order to prevent this from being unsafe and excessive, the only tools you have are the spring for the suspension on the outside of the curve and your sway bar.

The spring can only exert so much force on the vehicle to keep it upright. past that point the body will lean to the outside of the curve and continue to do so until the forces overcome the balance of the vehicle and it goes rolling off in a semi tangent line from the curve.

The sway bar comes into effect by tying the two sides of the axle together. As the car enters the curve, the outer wheel gets stuffed while the inner wheel hangs loose. With the sway bar connecting the two sides, the force generated by the lean of the body acts not only on the outside spring, but the inside spring as well, effectively doubling (or less, depending on the spring rate of the bar itself) the spring rate of the outer spring. That is what really prevents the body roll, since the lean is only counteracted by the outer springs and nothing else, with out a sway bar that is.

So when you disconnect your sway bar, whether it is attached to the body or not, you now only have one spring to counteract the force of the lean in a curve.

With the bar connected, you now can use the springs on both sides of the vehicle to counter act the lean.


Otherwise, with the way you explained it, what the heck is the point of having the bar there? To keep my wheels on the ground while the body leans as it pleases? I doubt the engineers would have done that on a high center of gravity vehicle prone to roll overs. It just opens the doors for a massive class action lawsuit for all the rolls overs the vehicle would enjoy.

I could argue this all day long, but why bother? You're right and I'm clearly wrong and that's how it's gonig to stay because you have more experience and knowledge than I do, so why bother listening to me?

Ok, everyone has an excellent prespective on the function of a sway bar, If it did not have a purpose well....... here is the run down,

Stabilizer bars are part of a car's suspension system. They are sometimes also called anti-sway bars or anti-roll bars. Their purpose in life is to try to keep the car's body from "rolling" in a sharp turn.
Think about what happens to a car in a sharp turn. If you are inside the car, you know that your body gets pulled toward the outside of the turn. The same thing is happening to all the parts of the car. So the part of the car on the outside of the turn gets pushed down toward the road and the part of the car on the inside of the turn rises up. In other words, the body of the car "rolls" 10 or 20 or 30 degrees toward the outside of the turn. If you take a turn fast enough, the tires on the inside of the turn actually rise off the road and the car flips over.

Roll is bad. It tends to put more weight on the outside tires and less weigh on the inside tires, reducing traction. It also messes up steering. What you would like is for the body of the car to remain flat through a turn so that the weight stays distributed evenly on all four tires.

A stabilizer bar tries to keep the car's body flat by moving force from one side of the body to another. To picture how a stabilizer bar works, imagine a metal rod that is an inch or two (2 to 5 cm) in diameter. If your front tires are 5 feet (1.6 meters) apart, make the rod about 4 feet long. Attach the rod to the frame of the car in front of the front tires, but attach it with bushings in such a way that it can rotate. Now attach arms from the rod to the front suspension member on both sides.

When you go into a turn now, the front suspension member of the outside of the turn gets pushed upward. The arm of the sway bar gets pushed upward, and this applies torsion to the rod. The torsion them moves the arm at the other end of the rod, and this causes the suspension on the other side of the car to compress as well. The car's body tends to stay flat in the turn.

If you don't have a stabilizer bar, you tend to have a lot of trouble with body roll in a turn. If you have too much stabilizer bar, you tend to lose independence between the suspension members on both sides of the car. When one wheel hits a bump, the stabilizer bar transmits the bump to the other side of the car as well, which is not what you want. The ideal is to find a setting that reduces body roll but does not hurt the independence of the tires.

I had mine off about a year, put it back on with the 6" lift hasn't impaired the articulation a bit far as I can see.

The added benifit from removing the rear bar is you get slightly more rear flex and the rear will flex alot easier without that bar there.

So with the slightly more rear flex, is it worth it?

I never noticed any difference to the handling on the road with out the rear swaybar. The better articulation off road is well worth the 10 minutes under the jeep to pull it off.

Actually the rear bar does have 4 mounting points - they're just indirect.
i.e. it mounts to the control arms - the control arms are mounted to the body and to the axle - so any compression on one side is transmitted though the bar to the other side. Just like any other sway bar.
It's not very effective - because rear sway bars aren't too effective - you'd notice the difference if you ran an autocross slalom and you might notice it towing a trailer in crosswinds.
But you'd probably have to do an immediate before and after comparison.

rear sway bars are only really significant on front wheel drive cars and then the rear sway bar had to be big, bigger than the front.

sway bars in general are a compromise - they allow reasonable handling with softer springs so you have a softer ride - best handling is with stiffer springs - they allow each wheel to respond independently.