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Excellent write-up. I have a few comments, mostly on the sway bar. For clarification, the stock sway bar on the GLS sedan is 13 mm; I just changed out Paki's at last week's meet and a 13 mm wrench fit over it easily. On GTs and 5-door GLSs, the bar is more like 15 mm (i.e., 14 mm wrench does not fit).Cypher said:
If you get a sway bar from the dealer or an owner of a Tibby, know that Hyundai distinguishes between 19 mm sway bars (the "gold standard") and 18 mm sway bars (almost as good) with a paint mark at about the halfway point of the bar. Green = 19 mm; Yellow = 18 mm. This is a more relaible indicator of the size than the part number; apparently the folks at the warehouse don't really distinguish between the two. If you order the 19 from the dealer, MAKE SURE it has the green mark on it. (I got the wrong one and luckily the dealer was willing to exchange it more than a month later. Out of three sway bars I saw during this process, two of them came from the warehouse with incorrect part numbers- one -2C000 with a yellow mark and one -2C100 with a green mark.)
If you have a hatchback Elantra, I highly recommend the 19 mm sway bar. If you have a sedan, the 19 is great, but the 18 is probably good enough. The hatchback is heavier than the sedan and most of that extra weight is in the back, so the bigger bar is really needed for the hatch.
Plastic end links: I don't think there is definitive data that says whether or not they are acceptable with the 19 mm sway bar. On the one hand, I've seen no information that says the plastic links are any weaker than the metal ones and have heard of no plastic end link failures related to the 19 mm bar, even with a lot of miles on them. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure every 19 mm bar Hyundai put in a car happened to be connected to metal end links. I think this is more a factor of timing than load requirements; when Hyundai was putting them on the 03 Tibby, they were still rolling out plastic end links and didin't have them on all cars yet. I believe all their cars with sway bars similar to ours now have the plastic end links.
Metal end links: If you're going to buy metal end links, I would not recommend buying them used unless the car you got them from had very few miles on it. The end links have ball joints in each end that are subject to wear. Because they are a wear item, though, you don't have to pay dealer prices; you can buy end links for our cars at autoparts stores. I've found prices per end link ranging from $11 to $22 depending on the store and the supplier. There are two suppliers of end links I am aware of, Moog and TRW. In both cases though, the parts themselves are made by Moog (my end links came in a TRW box and have Moog markings). The part numbers are:
Moog = K90360
TRW = 18343
For non-Hyundai rear sway bars, I'm not sure it is worth getting one. In the quote above: "These are high quality OEM stabilizer bars that have been heat-treated and have also undergone an additional proprietary process that increases the peak load by 30% and peak stress levels by 50% over OEM levels." It says that the stress and load levels (both indicators of strength) are higher than the OEM parts, but says nothing about being any stiffer. And even if they are stiffer, I don't know if that does us any good, since there are some stories of people putting 22 mm bars on Elantras and even Tibbies, and the tabs attaching them to the struts breaking off. I think 19 mm is about as stiff as you want to go unless you want to modify your struts.
And one general comment regarding urethane bushings: They tend to be noisy and creak. They need lubrication moreso than the stock rubber bushings do.
