Roadmaster Front Anti-Sway Bar Installation - 2019 Ford F-53

How to Install the Roadmaster Front Anti-Sway Bar on a 2019 Ford F-53

Ryan: How's it going Ryan here at etrailer.com. Today on our 2019 Ford F-53, we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Roadmaster front anti-sway bar. With motor home being such big and bulky vehicles, they tend not to have the tightest suspension. Whenever you're driving it down the road, they tend to sway a lot, throwing you around inside and even catch wind on those windy days and that's where a sway bar is really going to help. It's going to help really tighten up that suspension, really helping to eliminate that body roll, making a much more comfortable ride for you and your passengers and one thing I really recommend to use in conjunction with the sway bar is a steering stabilizer. The sway bars are really going to help with the suspension.

But that steering stabilizer is going to focus more on the steering, making your ride that much more comfortable. So this is what the sway bar is going to look like once you have it installed on your motor home. Now since this is a direct replacement, this is simply just going to replace the factory one.So the sway bar is an inch and three quarters in diameter and that's much thicker than the factory one and so that's the main reason why this is going to have a main advantage over the original one. The way the sway bar is actually going to work is whenever the motor home starts to lean one way, that sway bar is going to naturally want to push down and so when it does, what it's going to do is in turn, straighten out your motor home, keep it nice and level and reduce all that sway. Now before we install our sway bar, what I like to do is just run our motor home through the test course to see how it performs as is.

That way after we get our sway bar on, we can take it back through the course and see how our improvements are. So I'll start to approach our test course and the first thing that we're going to do is go over some bumps. So these bumps should really force us side to side to see how our motor home will sway.This will kind of simulate going over a curb or an uneven road or even a pothole. First couple of bumps as I straighten out, you can really feel the motorhome just swaying side to side like crazy. You can hear the stuff in the back kind of getting thrown around too.

That's something many people don't really think about. You're usually more focused on your driving experience as well as your passengers and that's completely understandable. But it's just a nice bonus too to try to eliminate anything get thrown around. Pretty bad. I mean we're only going a couple of miles an hour.

You can really feel it just getting tossed side to side. Now we can run through our slalom course and do a little evasive maneuvering and see how our motor home drives. So I pick up a little bit of speed here. Only going a few miles an hour. I'll make this first turn. Right away, you can feel that motor homes just leaning really bad, which in turn is going to make you kind of have to fight it to get it straightened out to give you that more comfortable ride.As I said we're only going a few miles an hour and you can definitely notice it. So I could only imagine if you're at a higher speed or a really windy day. How much worse it would really be. Now that we've installed our sway bar, let's go ahead and run it back to the test course to see if it improved. Straighten out a little bit here and get going over our bumps. As we go over the first couple, I can already tell a difference. That rock or that sway that we had, it's still there, don't get me wrong, but it's way less pronounced. It really only goes to one side and comes right back up and gets level. It's not going to sit here and rock back and forth like a boat in the ocean. I kind of noticed too, I can't really hear anything moving around or clinking around in the back. So everything inside the motor home just kind of feels a lot more stable. Now, we can go ahead and run through our slalom and do a little evasive maneuvering.I can't really get too aggressive here because of the snow and ice that we have today. But I can still make some sweeping turns and see how the motor home feels. As I make these turns even at a really low speed like this and just a gradual turn, it almost just feels like it's a lot more planted, if that makes sense. inaudible 00:04:46 wanting to kind of roll one way or roll the other. Just feels like it's nice and level and that we're in control. So overall the way to tighten up your motor home a little bit and just make your driving experience a little more relaxing and comfortable for you and your family and when it comes to the installation, it is relatively straightforward. But the sway bar itself is a little bit heavy and is going to take just a little bit of time. It's really not that bad. Speaking of which, let's go ahead and put it on together now. To begin our installation, we're going to be working underneath the front of our motor home.Now today we do have ours lifted off the ground a little bit and that's just to give you a better view of what's going on underneath. If you're doing this at home, this is something you're not going to have to do. The sway bar can easily be put on with the motor home actually sitting on the ground. We're going to need to remove our factory front sway bar and that's going to be located right in front of our front axle here. To get our sway bar removed, we're first going to come to the end of it and remove this side of our end link. So to get our end link detached from the sway bar, there's going to be one bolt and so what I'll do is I'll hold the nut side here with an 18 millimeter and on the other side the head of the bolt is going to be a 15. So we'll go ahead and take that off. Pull that out and repeat that same process for the other side.Now if you move to our mounts here that hold our factory sway bar in place, we're going to need to remove those and those are going to be held in place by two bolts. The head of the bolt is going to be a 15 millimeter and on the back side there's going to be a nut that we're going to have to hold steady with a wrench and that's going to be an 18 millimeter. Now these can be pretty tight. But they are manageable especially if you use a larger ratchet like this. So what we'll do is go ahead and get these broke loose. Now what I like to do with this bottom one is just leave it in hand tight because once we remove the other bolt as well as the bolts on the other side of the sway bar, there's going to be nothing holding it in place. That way with this one in hand tight and I'll do the same thing on the other side too, we're going to be able to kind of manage and hold the sway bar up, pull these out and then slowly lower that sway bar down.Now, with the top bolts completely removed and both of the bottom ones hand tight, we kind of support the sway bar and at the same time just finish taking off those hand tight bolts. Then we're able to carefully lower our sway bar and set it off to the side. So now we can prepare our new sway bar. So what you're going to want to do is just lay it kind of side by side with the factory one here and that'll kind of give us a reference point or an idea on where we need to put on our new bushings. So the way these work is what you're going to do is take that bracket off. These will be split. That way we can wrap it around the sway bar. But before you do that, what's you're going to want to do is take some of the included grease and we're going to want to lubricate that bushing. So you want to make sure and get full coverage inside and that'll just help eliminate any potential squeaks or anything like that as you go down the road. Then simply open it up.Push it around the new sway bar and for now we're just going to kind of take our mounting brackets. Just push them on and kind of just let them sit there like that for now. Just to kind of compare our new sway bar with the factory one here, there's going to be a couple of differences, the first one being that the Roadmaster sway bar is noticeably thicker than our factory one and if you we're to pick the two up and kind of just compare the weight of them, right away, you're going to be able to notice at the Roadmaster one is much more heavy duty. Now, to get our new sway bar installed, what we're going to do is come underneath and we're going to connect the end of the sway bar with our end links. So you're going to have an included bolt. You're going to push it through the sway bar and what I'm going to do is use the factory washers because they're a little bit larger and I just think they're going to work a little bit better, give us some more surface area. Just slide that over the bolt.You're going to just back this out a little bit. We can push our sway bar up, line it up with the end link and then feed that bolt though. On the other side again, one of these factory washers and a nylon lock nut. So we'll get this nut hand tight for now. Just use the same hardware combination over on the other side. So now if you kind of swing our sway bar up, you can attach it to the axle here where our mounting brackets are. To do that, we're going to take one of the included bolts. Put on a flat washer. We're going to pass that bolt through and on the other side of the bolt, let's take that flat washer and a nylon lock nut. We're just going to get this hand tight for now. We'll use that same hardware combination for the attachment point here as well as the two the other side. So now what you're going to want to do is make sure that the sway bar is centered.So you want the same distance on each side of your bushings and once you have it centered, what you can then do is tighten down all the hardware for our mounting brackets here. I'll take a three quarter inch wrench on one side, and I'm going to snug this up a little bit, but not completely tight because I still want to have a little bit of room. That way I can kind of hold this up and center it with our axle mounting location. Now when we tighten up our end link bolts, the trick to these is you don't want to over tighten them. So what you're going to want to do is tighten it until it pushes up flush with our sway bar and until you see the bushing inside of the end link, just start to compress. With everything tight, now we can come and use a torque wrench to torque it all to the manufacturer's recommendations and that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Roadmaster front anti-sway bar on our 2019 Ford F-53.