In the midst of an fe5 swap and following the how tos I can find. However, I haven't removed the down pipe and I can't get the bar to rotate down into position. Is the downpipe removal a must, or is there other tricks/something I'm missing here? Thanks.

 

When I did my sway bar swap I ended up lowering the subframe to get the clearance I needed to remove the sway bar.

If you Google "maven sway bar swap" you should see a ecotec website with his how-to. I think that's the one I followed if I remember correctly.

 

Yeah that's the one I'm following, how far did you drop the subframe? We have it in but it won't swing down in place and hangs up on pretty much everything.

 

I dropped it quite a bit.

I did this a long time ago so I'm going off memory... Did you remove the bolts from the front of the subframe?

 

I removed the rear transmission mount completely, tie rods and that's it. I didn't remove the down pipe because I didn't feel it was necessary but I'm running out of ideas, except the frame

 

Just did this yesterday. Loosen front sub frame bolts. Remove the rear sub frame bolts completely and then remove the transmission mount bolts. You should now be able to pry to sub frame down enough to pull out the sway bar and put new one in.

 

Thanks! I'll give this the ol college try after work and let you know how it goes.