Poor oem sway bar end links!

[alia176]

These poor guys just couldn't take it anymore! After installing Nevin's cool sway bar, the driver side end link separated from the weld. So, i took them both out of the car and reinforced them with mild welding.

Now, they both broke as seen in the pics. The links are not bent and they seemed to have broken cleanly. I'd love to hear some guesses as to what happened.

One bad side effect to all this, besides not having the sway bar in the car anymore, is that the brake calipers were affected. One of the sway bar ends, now floating in space, made repeated contact with the passenger side caliper. The area of contact is where the brake hose connects to the caliper, there is a large banjo bolt there. This bolt came loose and I was losing fluid. Easy fix, just tightened it up a tad and all is good.

Another potentially bad side effect could've been torn up CV boots. The end links which were attached to the suspension were floating free and riding against the boots. Luckily, the boots weren't cut and all is well. As a matter of precaution, all items are now out of the vehicle.

To my naked eye, it seems to me that the links broke in sheer vs in tension. Again, they are not bent

Let me know if you need to see more pics.

My next step is to find the root cause of this and come up with a replacement set. My reason for not going with the beefy end links that Nevin was selling was that i don't like heims for various reasons. I don't know if the answer is to simply make up a beefy set of arms with ball joints because the failure point will be moved somewhere else, though I don't know where!