Roadmaster Axle Mounting Bracket Kit for Chevrolet Express Van and Cut-Away Chassis

Video Transcript for Roadmaster Rear Anti-Sway Bar Installation - 2000 Chevrolet Express Van

Speaker 1: Today on this 2000 Chevrolet Express van, we'll be having a look at and showing you how to install the Roadmaster rear anti-sway bar and axle bracket kit, part number RM-1109-175-00, in conjunction with the Roadmaster axle mounting bracket kit for Chevrolet Express van chasses, part number RM-590061-00.Here's what our sway bar looks like installed. There are many reasons you're going to want an aftermarket sway bar on your motor home. One is if your vehicle doesn't already have a sway bar on the back of it, such as this one, this is going to greatly reduce the amount of side-to-side sway in the back. So when we're driving down the road, by having our sway bar in place, if a semi we're to pass us, we won't be steering trying to keep our vehicle to go straight. This will allow us to keep the steering wheel more centered as we're driving in a straight line. Also, when we're going around the corners, we won't be having to counter-steer quite as much when we're leaving the corners because we're not having the body roll that we're used to having without having the sway bar in place.So for example, if we're turning left, we'll have more weight transfer to our right side and that'll cause the right end to dip down and the left side to pick up.

By having the sway bar in place, the back end will be more planted down to the road and we won't feel like we're having to tip over as we're going around a sharp corner with any speed. This will help improve driver confidence and give us the extra sense of security that we're looking for.The sway bar itself is constructed with a solid design at a 41-40 chromali, which is considerably stronger and more durable than your standard 10-20 steel. Our bushings are polyurethane compared to your standard rubber bushings. By being polyurethane, they'll be able to withstand oil, gasoline, and ozone, so they're more durable and will last a much longer time. The bushings on our end links are also polyurethane as well, so by having polyurethane bushings all around, we'll know that we will have less service required on our sway bar over the years that we own our motor home.And now we'll take our motor home out of our test course.

You'll see it with the sway bar installed, and you'll notice how significantly less body roll there is while doing evasive maneuvers, going around corners, and just doing simple turns in a parking lot. You will also notice how much more settled the suspension is as we're going over bumps. We're able to maintain more stability and handling in the motor home.Now that we've gone over some features, we'll show you how to get it installed. To begin our install, we'll find ourselves in front of our rear axle, and now we need to find a location to mount or axle bracket. We need to mount it about six inches away from our weight spring, so that's basically right around the edge of where our shock mount is right here.

So we'll take our U-bolt and we'll place it in that area. We'll do the same on both sides. We're on the back side of our axle now. This is the other part of our mounting bracket that we need to install. This curved section here will face towards the axle, but as you can see right here, our brake line is in the way.

So we need to move our brake line out of this clip here so then it goes over the U-bolt instead. So we'll use a flathead screwdriver or a pry bar and we'll carefully pry the brake line out of its bracket, and we'll bend it up. With it out of the way, we'll take our bracket, slide it over the U-bolt like so.Now we have our sway bar on the ground below our rear axle. The arms here are facing towards the rear of our motor home, and this bend is facing down. This is how we're gonna have it oriented when we install it. Now we'll take the larger bushing. This is the one that fits inside of our saddle bracket here that comes with the sway bar. We'll take our grease here and we'll smear this inside of our bushing. Make sure you work it around all the way around the inside of the bushing. We'll do this for both of them. With our bushings lubricated, we're going to install them about right here in the center of our arms. So we'll just split them open, go around the bar, place it in position, then we'll take the saddle bracket and slide it over the bushing. The other side is the exact same way.Now, with an extra set of hands, we'll raise our sway bar to position, placing the saddle bracket over our U-bolt, and we'll secure it in a place with a flat washer and a nylon lock nut. Now that we have our sway bar attached to the axle, we'll attach our end links here to the sway bar. This section here where it kicks out, we want it kicked in towards our frame, so we want this section here facing out toward our sway bar. We'll remove this nut on the bottom, this washer and one bushing. Then we'll insert it to the top of our sway bar, place our bushing back on the bottom, followed by our washer. It's got a cup section on it; the cup will face your bushing. We'll reinstall the nut on the bottom and we'll do the same on the other side.Now we found ourselves at our driver's side wheel well. We have our axle hanging in our vehicle raised by the frame now, so we have access to this hole here. This is a factory hole where our wiring harness is clipped to. We un-clip the wiring harness and pull the wiring harness out of the way so that there's nothing on the other side of the frame, and we're gonna enlarge this hole to a half-inch in diameter now. Now we'll lift up our sway bar until our link is over that hole that we drilled. Now we have our cap screw with a flat washer. We'll go through our end link and into that hole in the frame. Now on the inside of the frame, we'll count the bolt off with a washer and a nylon lock nut. So you can see the nut right there with our washer behind it, so that's what we threaded it on. It's a very tight spot because on our motor home, the gas tank's right here so it's difficult to see.And now we have our vehicle lifted by the axle so all the weight is on the axle itself. It's not lifted by the frame anymore. We're gonna begin to tighten down our hardware that attaches our sway bar brackets to the axle itself. Since we're on a U-bolt, we're gonna tighten these down in an alternating pattern so it's equal. And now we'll torque our U-bolts in an alternating fashion to the amount specified in the instructions for our axle mounting kit. Now we'll tighten our nut on the bottom of our end link to our sway bar until our bushings start to compress into form a little bit. Now we'll tighten our end link to our frame. Now we'll torque our hardware to the amount specified by the instructions.And that completes our look at and installation of the Roadmaster rear anti-sway bar and axle bracket kit, part number RN-1109-175-00 on this 2000 Chevrolet Express van.