B'cuda
Well-Known Member
How much height can you get from the adjusting bolts? Right now about half of the bolt head protrudes below the LCA.
The lower and higher you go the harsher the ride. Low will hit the bump stops over bumps and too high takes all the spring out of the front end. It will ride like a old wagon.
Say what you will. If you crank the bars up it will reduce the travel and produces a harsh ride. Don't ask me how I know.The bump stops are the only thing you have to worry about. Well, and getting the right alignment numbers.
Nothing changes with spring rate by adjusting the torsion bar bolts. The car weighs the same, there is no “twist” added to the bars, the adjusting lever just sits at a different angle to the torsion bar hex.
Say what you will. If you crank the bars up it will reduce the travel and produces a harsh ride. Don't ask me how I know.View attachment 1715200775
Completely agree. the only way to change the spring rate on a streight torsion bar is to shorten it, thicked it, or use another type of steel. A coil spring is also a form of torsion bar. If you cut out a coil you lower the ride height but you increase the spring rate because you have shortened the overall length of the torsion bar.Nothing changes with spring rate by adjusting the torsion bar bolts.
IMHO. A broken torsion bar like that is a manufacturs defect. It had to be twisted past its elastic limit to bend and would have to be brittle to snap. Just MHO but physics os physicsstill beg to differ. But
On a Chevy site. You have what 4 Mopars? Take your choice and jack the thing up and crank the bars up fairly close to the top and go for a drive. Dang right it rides like a lumber truck.
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IMHO, there is a reason for the factory specific ride height adjustment parameters. They were helping us to get the best ride possible.
I still beg to differ. But that's what we do here. Disagree and debate.View attachment 1715200790
And the big thing I discovered was that as the LCA rotates up and down,it carries the chassis with it, and so the centerlink too. But the two may not rise and fall in lock step, which introduces bump steer. There is a sweetspot in the curves where this is minimized. And I bet that is where Mopar designed the rideheight to be. On my car the sweet spot started out only about 2 inches wide, one up and 1 down. The outer tierod pivot point was too far out and too low,IIRC. That was year 2000 when I debugged it. Oh and the idler-arm height was wrong too.
Thanks for all the input guys, I don't think I'm going much over an inch in height, it's a 69 fastback with super stock springs in back, and the rake makes the front look droopy with 15s to the top of the wheel opening. Underneath my old style Hedmans pick up grass from the center hump in our dirt road, yeehaa! But since it sounds like an alignment will ensue, I'll probably go ahead with new joints and bushings first, who knows, that in itself may pick it up abit of height.
Bump steer is minimized when everything is close to parallel, which happens significantly lower than where Mopar designed the factory ride height to be. But again, bias ply tire suspension geometry is a different animal that radial tire suspension geometry. The factory did what they did because it was best for bias ply's, and that's darn near opposite of what's best for radials.
so with that being said, when you put radials on your mopar today, the factory specs on alignment is useless? or is that a starting point? the person performing the alignment needs to know what? i dont know jack about camber/toe ride height when it relates to proper alignment and am having to soon take my ride to someone.
The factory specs are for bias ply tires. They’re actually worse than useless, because they’re absolutely wrong for radial tires. They're almost opposite of what you actually want. The person doing the alignment definitely needs to know that, but they probably won’t because they probably won't be old enough to know that these cars came with bias ply tires from the factory and not radials. And depending on the shop, they won’t align the car to anything other than factory specs regardless. A lot of the major chain alignment shops will only use the specs in the computer, which are the factory specs.
If you're running radial tires on one of these cars, you should be using alignment specs similar to the ones in this chart
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