As I'm sure some of us that have removed / upgraded the factory panhard bar have wondered what exactly was inside of it rattling around, I figure I'd find out.

Just cleaning up my garage a bit tonight while it snows and I came across the panhard bar.

First off you need several of these:


You need one of these:


And of course, one of these:


Combine them, and you get this, rubber stopper fail:


Cut some more off:


Cool, end of the butt plug:


Dump it:


Birdshot?!?!?!




Yeah, I really was THAT bored tonight. But I was always curious what the hell was inside of it, lol.

 

Very interesting, my car had a rattle that the Ford dealer couldn't find. It went away when I took off the stock panhard bar.

 

This shows my ignorance, but I never knew a stock 'Stang GT even comes with a Panhard bar as much as the body feels like it rolls in a turn.

Anyway, now that I can reload my shotgun shells when I get sick of my stock panhard bar!

EDIT: Whoops! I was thinking about anti-swaybars when I was talking about body roll in a turn.

 

Well, I got curious and just had to see for myself if the stock GTs come with a panhard bar. With a cheap-o flashlight in hand, I peeked under y car and Lo! And Behold!
My car has both a panhard AND a rear anti-sway bar!

Those I will be swapping out sooner or later, I still feel a bit of roll, and the stock UCA & LCA and springs sum up for some bad wheel hop, so those will be going too!

 

Ahh, I didn't know it was a mystery.

And fwiw Jim, the PHB is not a roll control device. All S197's have PHB's on them, and only the very base of the base older V-6's had no rear swaybar. All the other cars have rear swaybars. But swaybar sizes, etc. do vary....

 

I knew that! LOL

Anyway, as for the Panhard rod having birdshot in it, why is that?
I can understand if the idea is to put in more mass for the sake of inertial purposes (linear, and also moment-wise), but isn't that primarily the function of the springs and shocks to provide that resistance? (Aside from eliminating suspension movement oscillations by way of dampening.)

 

Harmonics.... It's a tube that bolts to the axle and body. The shot acts to quell vibration and therefore noise.

 

Wasn't really a mystery I guess. I was just curious as to what the heck was inside of it.

 

That's the damndest thing I think I've ever seen in a suspension component. Strange.

 

OE's will go to lots of trouble to hold most sources of NVH down as low as reasonably possible. Filling a tubular PHB with shot is maybe not an obvious solution, but then again most of us would never be able to isolate some particular bit of noise to the PHB in the first place (I'm guessing that there were noise "spikes" at one or more particular frequencies that would add to the general interior noise level and they were working to shut them up).

The engineering behind what comes off the production line is not limited to topics of structural, mechanical, electronic and electromagnetics, and "producibility". Engineered noise control solutions are quite common.


Norm