NA6 cars have sway bars with short lever arms and the sway bar mounts for the bushings are located further rearward on the chassis legs. NA8 sway bars have longer lever arms and the sway bar bushings are mounted further forward on the chassis legs to allow clearance for the crankshaft pulley because the 1.8L BP engines are physically longer than the 1.6L B6 engines, thus the crank pulley is located further forward. If you do a 1.8L swap into a 1.6L car you almost always have to address this as clearance is minimal otherwise.Originally Posted by MiataQuest
NB sway bars are mounted in the forward chassis position like the NA8 sway bars but they have a different contour to the lever arms. OEM NA and NB end links are different. NA end links use simple bushings with a through bolt design that connects to the NA lower control arm which has two metal tabs. The bolted joint is in double shear. NB end links use ball joints top and bottom. Thus the NB lower control arm is different to fit the different style end link, it has just one mounting tab that is made of thicker gauge steel.
You can cobble together a NB sway bar onto a NA chassis using NA lower control arms and certain aftermarket adjustable sway bar end links with heim joints. But it's a bit Mickey Mouse. Once you start taking aftermarket parts then it all depends. It might work fine. Or it might fatigue the mounting tabs on your lower control arms until they break or you might experience end link bind or interference with other components. Or you could swap to NB control arms or V8R control arms or any other number of variations. As they say, your mileage may vary.
I used those same AWR sway bar mounting brackets on my car. They're awesome but beware you may run into some issues with power steering and/or AC lines depending on which version of the AWR bracket you have. Some have closed ends, some are open. They used to make two different versions, one for NA and one for NB. But now they all fit 90-05 cars.
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