Torsion bars

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downsr

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Getting ready to buy torsion bars any suggestions on what brand and size to buy.going in 70 duster 340 have 892 and 893 bars in it now one is damaged is why i am changing them
 
Take a look at the new PST bars that have been reclocked. I bought the 1.03 bars for my big block Dart. They're getting great reviews.
 
I will be buying new bars soon also. I too was looking at buying the 1.03 bars from PST. Plus you get a discount for being a member on here. Cant beat that!
 
The 103 bars are less than the others also, not that it is a deal breaker if they are not.
I just recently put 103's in place of the original 098's and couldn't be happier with them.

With the FABO discount they were $220 shipped.

They are already black powder coated when you get them too. :)
 
tekslk said:
Must you realign after a torsion bar swap?
Click to expand...

Yes you should! But if you get the ride back to the same ball park area you would probably be fine without doing an alignment. That's assuming it is currently good.

I would also recommend the 1.03 bars. Really updates the handling of the car and the ride is not horrible.
 
tekslk said:
Must you realign after a torsion bar swap?
Click to expand...


Yes. It will be very difficult to get the front end to the same exact height that it was before.

If you don't re-align it, you can get excess tire wear.
 
there are many bars that are good and will ork.

i'd go .920 at the minimum. i have used just suspension .920 bars and 1" bars and they have been great. some here have use pst with good results (just make sure they are the newer reclocked ones). firmfeel has good bars too...
 
oh and measure ride height before you pull it apart. if you get it as close as you can to that with the new bars i doubt it will change the alignment enough to worry about. that is assuming you have a good alignment to begin with..
 
The right bar kinda depends on what you want out of the car. The 1.03" bars are going to be pretty stiff, and won't be good if you want a boulevard ride. They are more typically used for racing apps or very stiff front ends like for solo. The -892-and -893 are .870" diameter; going up to 1.03" diameter will increase the front end spring stiffness by 97%...almost double the stiffness. That is a serious increase, and would likley need a change in the shocks to make it work well.

It would be helpful for the OP to say what he wants out of the car. For example, if he is exclusively drag racing, then he ought to go with /6 t-bars.... so some info from the OP would be best before just blithely ID'ing this or that bar.
 
You could put a lot of effort into getting it back where it was. Why do that if you don't know it was correct ?
If a torsion bar is damaged, if vehicle hasn't been on alignment rack in a long while,
if tire life is a concern, lots of other reasons that alignment would be a good thing.
Something else about torsion bars that crossed my mind recently... I don't know how much longer a B-body torsion bar is or if their hex ends are the same size as a-body but.. When fitting the A500 or A518 trans in a A-body, What if the entire torsion bar cross member could be moved rearward to achieve clearance ?
 
I think the 1.03" bars would be perfect for street use.

Too stiff? I have 1.12" torsion bars on my Duster. That's a 300 lb/in wheel rate. Using Fox shocks with them I wouldn't even say that the ride on my Duster is "too stiff" for the street. It's very similar to a modern performance car. Obviously not everything is comparable, but the ride quality of the 1.12" bars in my Duster is very similar to my g/f's 2013 Mustang with the suspension upgrade. And I run 18" rims and 35 series tires.

I'm with abodyjoe, although I personally wouldn't go below a 1" bar. I had 1" Just Suspension bars on my Duster before I upgraded to the 1.12's. They were a big improvement over stock, but they were still too soft for the performance I wanted. So they came out. And my Duster is not a heavy car, its a 340 4 speed with no A/C, manual steering, manual brakes, and lots of aluminum parts (iron heads though).

The Mopar performance chart, while handy for the spring rates it provides, is outdated on its description of the bars' performance. Tire and shock technology has improved significantly since that chart came out, and that means higher spring rates.

RedFish said:
Something else about torsion bars that crossed my mind recently... I don't know how much longer a B-body torsion bar is or if their hex ends are the same size as a-body but.. When fitting the A500 or A518 trans in a A-body, What if the entire torsion bar cross member could be moved rearward to achieve clearance ?
Click to expand...

That's actually a REALLY good idea. B/E body torsion bars are 41" long, A body bars are 35.8". The hex ends are the same size, so if you moved the A body crossmember back 5.2" you could use the B/E body torsion bars. The spring rate would be slightly different than advertised because it takes into account the length of the LCA, which is shorter on an A-body, but you could calculate that knowing the length of both LCA's to get the spring constant for the bars. If 5.2" would get you enough clearance, it might work really well.
 
For sure do a toe-in alignment or you may get extreme tire wear or wander. Any time you adjust ride height (or suspension sags), toe-in changes. I do myself w/ a tape measure. Not hard and quite accurate if you have any common-sense.
 
I've got 1" tbars from JustSuspension on my Dart, upgraded from stock .870" bars.
The Dart is my daily driver.
Recently I also installed a pair of adjustable Hotchkis shocks on the front, which handle the torsionbars way better than the KYB's I had before them.
On the rearaxle I have a pair of Bilstein shocks and 7 blade leafsprings per side.
I will be installing a pair of adjustable QA1 shocks soon.

The car feels more modern, 'firm' would be good wording. Certainly not 'stiff'.
I would be willing to upgrade to 1.06" bars without any doubt either.
 
rklein383 said:
So what in the heck does reclocking mean?
Click to expand...
The ends of the T-bars are hexagonal shapes, that fit and lock into the chassis sockets and the lower control arm sockets. Looking from the end of the t-bars, these hexagonal shapes have to be in a certain orientation to each other on the front and rear ends of the bars to fit into the chassis right. There were some out there that were not made right and the design was 're-clocked' to get them right.

This is also the reason for the left and right PN's in the smaller diameter T-bars; they have a to be different from one side to the other for them to fit right for the small T-bars (that twist more when they get loaded). Larger T-bars don't twist as much when loaded and so can be the same on each side and still fit.

Stiff? It is all a matter of personal preference AND the application. T-Bars (and springs of any type) CAN be too stiff on roads that have rough surfaces and have large bumps; the shock/spring combo that matches will not be compliant on rough roads. That is why the OP needs to help with info. And the guys who like the 1" bars really would help to say what kind of roads they drive on and how, where they drive their cars, etc. ... IMO. It is like cams and compression raio : there are different characteristics and uses of different grinds; an HP cam won't typically be good for torque applications. And 11:1 CR may be great on the strip with the rigth fuels but would be unusable in general driving.
 
nm9stheham said:
Stiff? It is all a matter of personal preference AND the application. T-Bars (and springs of any type) CAN be too stiff on roads that have rough surfaces and have large bumps; the shock/spring combo that matches will not be compliant on rough roads. That is why the OP needs to help with info. And the guys who like the 1" bars really would help to say what kind of roads they drive on and how, where they drive their cars, etc. ... IMO. It is like cams and compression raio : there are different characteristics and uses of different grinds; an HP cam won't typically be good for torque applications. And 11:1 CR may be great on the strip with the rigth fuels but would be unusable in general driving.
Click to expand...

It's definitely application based, you obviously wouldn't want 1.12" bars if you were mostly drag racing, just like you wouldn't want /6 bars on anything you drive on the street.

I drive my Duster with 1.12" bars pretty much entirely on the street. While California roads aren't usually as torn up as say, Michigan roads or anywhere else in the Great Lakes area, California spends about the least out of any state in the nation on road repair per mile of road, so the roads I drive are plenty rough and bumpy. I also have a few gravel roads I drive on a semi-frequent basis, all with washboards and plenty of pot holes. Which is why I likened how my car rides to a modern performance car. Most newer cars have a much stiffer ride quality than anything from the musclecar era, and if you drive a new Challenger, Mustang, Camaro etc then you have a pretty decent idea of what my car feels like as far as ride quality is concerned. It's fairly stiff, but not harsh. You can feel the road, but still drive it for hours without being in pain ;). And the 1" bars I had on it made it ride quite a bit softer than the other new car I can compare it to, which is a 2013 Mustang with 18" wheels and the premium suspension package. Heck it was even softer than a newer honda civic. And since most folks don't daily drive their Mopars I don't think twice about telling people to go with 1" torsion bars, because their daily probably has stiffer suspension than that.

I wouldn't ever put anything smaller than a 1" torsion bar on any of my cars again. In fact, I don't even plan to use the 1" bars I already have for my Dart, which will be more of a "cruiser" than my Duster is. Not that it won't still perform well, but it's going to be a little more low key than the Duster. And I'm still debating 1.03" or 1.06" bars for it, and leaning to the 1.06" bars. The shocks that you use are the real key for larger torsion bars, Bilsteins or Foxs make a big difference compared to Gabriel's or KYB's. Got to match everything to make it work right.
 
Wow I just learned so much my head hurts, I love it. Looks like my dart might be getting new t-bars. Thanks guys.

Jeff
 
nm9stheham said:
Stiff? It is all a matter of personal preference AND the application. T-Bars (and springs of any type) CAN be too stiff on roads that have rough surfaces and have large bumps; the shock/spring combo that matches will not be compliant on rough roads. That is why the OP needs to help with info. And the guys who like the 1" bars really would help to say what kind of roads they drive on and how, where they drive their cars, etc. ... IMO.
Click to expand...

Living and driving in an around a large European city I can say I encounter all kinds of roadtypes, from brick stone roads, infested with speedbumps, upto smooth asphalt, also infested with speedbumps usually. And ofcourse the overabundance of roundabouts which seem so popular overhere.

Before I upgraded the Dart, coming up to most speedbumps made the car behave kinda 'ridiculous' if you didn't slow down enough; LCAs pretty much bottoming out on the upramp, suspension way unloading shortly after that, and the same happened in reverse on the downramp of the speedbump, followed by a few 'afterbumps' in the suspension.
In relation, newer cars don't really have to slow down.

Now, with the better torsionbars and shocks, I can drive over the speedbumps with the same speeds as all the other traffic around me, without causing unsettling suspension movements, making my car look like a cartooncar. (Well, not more than usual ;) )

On pretty much all road surfaces the car drives and handles much more 'serious' and modern than before.

If you look at the 1:19 mark in the Hotchkis videoclip below, you'll see exactly how my car also behaved after a dip/bump/speedbump;
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3q5RCsWwYw"]Development of the New Hotchkis Tuned APS Adjustable Monotube Shocks - YouTube[/ame]

My car now seems to behave pretty much just like the endresult in the clip.
 
BigBlockMopar said:
Living and driving in an around a large European city I can say I encounter all kinds of roadtypes, from brick stone roads, infested with speedbumps, upto smooth asphalt, also infested with speedbumps usually. And ofcourse the overabundance of roundabouts which seem so popular overhere.

Before I upgraded the Dart, coming up to most speedbumps made the car behave kinda 'ridiculous' if you didn't slow down enough; LCAs pretty much bottoming out on the upramp, suspension way unloading shortly after that, and the same happened in reverse on the downramp of the speedbump, followed by a few 'afterbumps' in the suspension.
In relation, newer cars don't really have to slow down.

Now, with the better torsionbars and shocks, I can drive over the speedbumps with the same speeds as all the other traffic around me, without causing unsettling suspension movements, making my car look like a cartooncar. (Well, not more than usual ;) )

On pretty much all road surfaces the car drives and handles much more 'serious' and modern than before.

If you look at the 1:19 mark in the Hotchkis videoclip below, you'll see exactly how my car also behaved after a dip/bump/speedbump;
Development of the New Hotchkis Tuned APS Adjustable Monotube Shocks - YouTube

My car now seems to behave pretty much just like the endresult in the clip.
Click to expand...


With a smallblock and the PST 1.03 bars my car rides about like the car in the video at about the 2:08 mark.
Runs a lot flatter on corners also, and I don't have sway bars.

Our roads suck due to potholes and height variances as well as no curbs or sidewalks to speak of so dropping the the wheels off the inside edge of a corner into the dirt wasn't even close to a possibility without bottoming the suspention.
Now it just blows right through that like it wasn't even there.
Same with those little 2-3 inch deep water runoff troughs in housing tracts that are concrete.
Don't even have to give em a thought anymore.
 
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