Removing front sway bar adding rear sway bar

The front anti-sway bar is not the issue here. I’m on my third Tacoma, and the first thing I do is remove the anti-sway bar.

Sure, you can hit your front bump stops in the perfect situation, but OP is right that we don’t get maximum compression up front in most situations.

Front bars are for road manners; rear bars are for maximum offroad traction.

And I don’t buy into the hypothesis that a rear bar will make the front dive more in corners. A rear bar resists sway in sweepers too, if you keep your foot off the brake.

 

No hypothesis involved. Pick up a couple chassis books and learn how suspensions actually work.

 

I don’t doubt why someone who decelerates in a turn would get more nose dive from running only a rear sway bar (or why Toyota sells Tacomas — with consideration toward the liability that anyone could be driving it — with only a front sway bar).

In fact, the phenomenon of nose dive from only a rear bar would just confirm the effectiveness of a rear bar to force the front suspension to put in more work.

Yet, driving experience and prior suspension setups tell me that as long as I’ve braked adequately before entering a turn, and I accelerate lightly to make the turn, I’m keeping my nose up just fine.

(Maybe I should mention my particular truck is evenly split for weight distribution, front and rear? Most of us aren’t driving around with empty beds.)

(And though I admit it’s not a completely fair comparison, it has been pretty common practice among rally racers to run only a rear bar, if they run one at all. And it’s not unusual in dedicated off-road applications either.)

At any rate, I don’t think either I or OP care in this instance as much about road manners as we do about keeping four wheels planted off road, and running just a rear bar helps with that.

In a perfect world, we’d have a disconnect-able front bar too. As far as I have seen, no one has been able to find a solution for 05-23 Tacomas that keeps disconnected front bar ends away from other components during maximum articulation. So what OP is proposing may be the best we can do, for off road use.

 

I have no sway bars. The wheels articulate independently on and off road. Done

you would be increasing understeer by having the front being the side that’s doing the rolling.