Streaming TV shows and movies directly to your home is a breeze With Netflix. As a Netflix member, you can instantly watch TV and movies on your PC, mac, mobile device, or television. Get a free thirty day trial membership. Go to Netflix dot com slash stuff and sign up today. Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, how do stabilizer bars work? Stabilizer bars are part of
your car's suspension system. There's sometimes also called anti sway bars or anti roll bars. Their purpose in life is to try to keep your car's body from rolling in a sharp turn. Think about what happens to a car in a sharp turn. If you're inside the car, you know that your body gets pulled towards 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 towards 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 ten or twenty or thirty 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 can flip over if you do it hard enough. Roll is bad. It tends to put more weight on the outside tires and less weight 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 the 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 the other. To picture how a stabilizer bar works, imagine a metal rod that's an inch or two in diameter. If your front tires are five to part,
make that rod about four ft 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 on the outside of the turn gets pushed upwards. The arm of the sway bar gets pushed upward, and this
applies torsion to the rod. The torsion then moves the arm on 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 and 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 entire or bumped to the other side of the car as well, which is not what you want. The ideal is defined a setting that reduces body roll but does not hurt the independence of the suspension. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at
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