Torsion Bar suspension set ups.

Yes you can use wrecking yard torsion bars in a hot rod. If you are going to run a small block standard Toyota Pick Up bars will work, the three quarter and one tons will work for a big block, for the front with the bars running long ways. As stated above Schroder's web site has a bar chart showing how much the spring rate changes with the ARM LENGTH. So when building your frame and ARMS have some adjustment room to dial the bars in. My ARMS go into the bat wings where the ARM rests on a roller, there are three bolt holes for the roller which is about a 50% change according to Schroders chart. The frame needs a cross member or support at the stop end. Some pics in my album. Look at the previous post with sprint car bars, instead of the ARMs being straight from the splines out they have welded the ARM to the bottom of a block that has the splines. Do a little thinking and drawing time to figure out bar hight versus frame hight.

 

dodge still uses it....as does chevy trucks...ford rangers...etc...Volare was common swap...many a 56 ford has volare clip...i know of a 46 dodge with 350 chev and volare clip...able to lower it into weeds....rides nice..handles great...all torsion bar is is a spring..in rod form...

 

I'm using one in my 37 Terraplane with a K-car R&P steering, handles good and couldn't get a better ride.

 

I may be confused on the Moal price. It could be $3,000 per end, $6,000 total. I do note that their current price for a roller 32 chassis with T-bar suspension is $13,500.

 

Good to see I'm not the only one that might get confused now and again. I don't have that left out feeling now.

Ed

 

I can see why Gibbons quit making them....its like I said...they were the worse riding suspension mod in the business.

On installing it correctly, FATMAN himself, left his booth at the f100 nationals and crawled under my truck for a long time checking every aspect of my install....said he could not have put it in any better!!!

For those of you saying your cars ride good in your stock vehicles, well...the frames are not f100 frames...your frames are designed for torsion bars....f100's were not...they were meant to flex and move.

Volare torsion bars are NOT adjustable. They have one setting that is correct and it is either too soft and bottoms out or too hard and rides like a boat....I think it is 2 3/4 inches of clearance at the point the factory says to use as the correct setting....Look it up non-sayers.

As for torsion bars....they can only twist to absorb impact....coil springs twist and move up and down...twice the absorbing impact ability.

My low mileage Nissan pick up has torsion bars.....it bottoms out all the time...the very low threshold of movement is just not good...period.

As soon as I installed a 71 monte carlo front suspension clip, my ride improved 200%...I am picky. My best friend cannot even tell the difference in how a car rides in the summer time and winter time...so some folks just don't have the capability to know what "good ride" means.

By the way....the gibbons set up was not volare based....it was Cordoba based.

 

Either way that is a TON of money!

 

Maybe that was the issue then. That was a fun converstation with Dwight either way.

 

FWIW Gorden Jennings hopped up a Honda 450 and road raced it in competition at tracks back in the day. He said his biggest fear when he started the build was no practical way to get around using the stock factory torsion bar valve "springs". When he ended that program the torsion bars turned out to be the least of his problems, they were never a limiting factor with all his other engine mods, and never gave any problems. IIRC he used the original set for the life of the project which was more than one season.

The bar concept is not bad, just has to be engineered well to fit the application.

Ed

 

For sure! Size of my piggy bank would dictate using stock, roundy 'round, home built, or a mix of those parts.

I've always thought a longitudinal set up would be neat to try someday. Everybody keep posting your ideas and opinions on all the set ups.

Ed

 

My '67 E-Type Jag had torsion bar front suspension and that thing had plenty of suspension travel, handled great and felt supple even over the roughest washboard surfaces.

 

I am not a expert on suspension but I have been told that a car does not know if it has coils or leaf or bar suspension. That being said cars will react differently, but is that due to type of suspension or improper installation? My stuff is not pretty like Moal's but it looks like it will work with junk yard parts! Once you get the bars mounted with ARMS a floor jack and bath room scale can give you the spring rate.

 

Correct....the car does not know....it does not know if it has a moonshine hauling set up ( a solid bar across the rear transverse spring making it solid....but....

Your kidneys and butt know it.

Last nite coming home from a car show 30 miles away, I knew I was in a car that had a stiff transverse rear spring....believe me....like my friend says when he rides in my avatar name...I can tell if its heads or tails if we run over a coin in your car.

 

Torsion bar set ups have different spring rates just like other springs.
The linkage arm length makes a big difference on every aspect of the ride quality too.

Just like anything else, slapping a suspension together without some research an accurate weights will give you crappy results unless you get lucky.

 

what spring would you guys use in a rpu/ modified with a 331 long bell hemi?

 

You can't just guess with a bar set up. You will have to 4 corner scale it after you build it too find out what size bar you need. Also, the leverage factor of the length of the arm will come into play.

 

Ever heard of a front coil spring breaking...? Not me.

Ever heard of a torsion bar breaking.....? Yep...quit a few....especially after a crack begins.

Again....how many "cars" have torsion bar suspensions?...after all torsion bar suspension is much cheaper to produce by auto companies.

Like my friend says when I complain about the torsion bar front end in my late model Nissan Frontier....." Its a truck, its suppose to ride rough".

I have noticed with torsion bars, when you go over a bump or hit say a man hole cover thats not even, it feels like someone has set a stick of dyamite on top of the wheel and it shoots the tire down real hard, the recoil is pretty violent with these front ends....again....torsion bars can only twist....coil springs twist and compress, using two methods to absorb the impact....its science...its just a better suspension or all cars would have torsion bars...most today have coil spring McPherson suspensions....my subaru sw I had would ride like a big caddy and corner like its was on rails.

 

Torsion bar suspension is more expensive to manufacturer than McPherson strut. If the car is bouncing up high after a bump the shocks are not matched to the suspension or not working or are shot. McPherson was invented by a GM engineer in the 50s as a way to build a cheap suspension for an economy car.



Ago

 

I don't have anything technical to add. I think the tub being referenced in the begining is Denny Jamison's of Automotive Hammer Art. Steve Panarites of Steve's Auto Fab built the chassis and suspension. Steve works out of Lee Osborn's old shop in Jamestown, IN.

 

Denny's Tub and a front shot of Steve's T as it was being built.

 

Mac Struts are cheaper and easier to package - not better performance wise.

A coil spring is just a coiled up torsion bar - it is not scientifically better as you stated. Coils have more unsprung weight than a torsion bar, and that weight is up higher on the chassis. Your anti torsion bar rants are misguided and lack understanding. You are basing your bias on some bad engineering and bad applications and spring rates. Enough.

 

Can we stop the pissing contest... I understand some people dont like torsion bars. Lets keep this factual please.

 

How about pics of the torsion arm to wishbone?

 

.

Here you go Kona,

Excuse the dirt and grime, been driving the wheels off the damn thing.

Not the best pics, but I'm busy work and just ran out to the shop and snapped a few for you.


Front drivers - dead perch with a spherical bearing...







Pass front - Shackle...





Rear - torsion arm sits on top of a roller that's attached to the rear 'bone...





Hope that helps.

 

Helped me, thanks for taking the time to shoot the pics and post.

How did the spherical end on the LF get fabbed?

Ed

 

Daddy-O, nice way to eliminate a panhard bar! I hadn't thought of doing it that way! BTW, your car is awesome!

 

Speaking of eliminating the panhard bar or dead perch. If you look at the latest Hot Rod magazine with Bugsby's 32 Ford road race car you see the center axle locater. I have seen this before on other hot rods.



Ago

 

Modern coil springs have varible rate springs now....they are super tuned to ride and handle superior to any other suspension system....ever heard of a variable rate torsion bar...give me a break.

My experience is actually owning a f100 truck that had the suspension installed correctly and the company quit making it....yeah, it was just such a great front end for a vehicle that it was not designed for that they just couldn't keep production up and had to cancel making it....really?

I also own a truck now that has torsion bar suspension and drove another truck that had torsion bars before I bought mine....rode like a old dodge truck rode...had one of those too....and I drove 2 hours to try out this pick up truck....no way I would have owned it....mine did ride better than it did but that is not saying much.

Again, I guess some of you do not get that the torsion bar can only twist and it cannot be varible rate and is know to crack where any variation in size exsists....coil springs twist and in addition....collapse...you get two shock absorbing actions vs one.

And AGO, you need to go back and read my previous post...see if anywhere, you see where I said the car bounces when I hit a bump.....I said the front tires feel as though they have a stick of dyamite forcing them down when I hit an bump or rough place....the truck does not bounce and I do not know where you got that idea.

From the ALLPAR site itself...a mopar site :

Speaking of torsion bars.....

Through the years, Chrysler vehicles tended to corner better than their domestic counterparts - or felt better. The company eventually went to other designs, when their cars were downsized, and the advantages of torsion bars were outweighed by the disadvantages - a clear and unavoidable tradeoff between noise, vibration, and harshness on one hand, and cornering capabilities on the other. The more isolation was added, the worse the cornering would be.

Original is at Chrysler torsion bar suspensions (and leaf springs) http://www.allpar.com/cars/suspensions.html#ixzz2XKF4DbaV
Follow us: @allparcom on Twitter | allparcom on Facebook

I am through discussing this topic, one only has to type in torsion bar suspension and what I am saying is everywhere in print....like the bumper sticker says...."Critical thinking, the other national deficit" might be in play here.

 

the Osborne cars I have seen, the arm off the torsion bar basically rest on the wishbone end. I have pics somewhere of a 32 style truck with one of his or the greeks front end... that tub that david wilder owns is the $h!t

 

It is correct that torsion bars in themselves have a constant spring rate. That being so, their rate cannot be altered simply by adjusting the ride height higher or lower, as the first quote above implies. Barring the effects of control arm effective angle, which I submit are small (perhaps 3-4%), a car on torsion bars should ride the same regardless of the ride height at which the bars are set.

The spring rate of a torsion bar depends on the arm length, bar length, and bar diameter. Of these the diameter has the greatest effect: increasing the diameter 10% will give a 46% increase in spring rate. It requires an increase in diameter of only 19% to double the spring rate.

It is unconventional, but it is certainly possible to get a rising spring rate out of a torsion bar geometrically, by using clever links like those on motorbike monoshock rear suspensions.

Rising-rate coil springs are not that common, really. They all work by varying the number of active coils over the suspension travel, either by inducing a gradual coil bind from one end by varying the coil pitch over the length of the spring, or by collars between separate coils in series which bottom on stop rings, as on off-road trucks. The latter might better be called stepped-rate than variable-rate springs. None achieve their variable-rate characteristics by metallurgy, by mere money, or by magic.

Likewise leaf springs can be made to have a variable rate by splaying the shorter leaves, so that they only touch the next-longer leaf at a certain point in the travel. But the only spring medium that naturally and intrinsically has a rising rate is gas, e.g. air.

The biggest problem with torsion bars is damping; especially as it affects the design process regarding packaging etc. It was not until the '50s and Colin Chapman's adoption of soft, well-damped springs in high-performance applications that the importance of proper damping began to be realized. When the spring is considered much more important than the damper one is always sure that one can do something to add a bit of damping to a torsion bar. When the spring and damper are considered equally important one basically has to do the same design job twice, find space and structure for two systems, one rotary and one linear - and make sure they are mutually optimized. Sometimes the answer is a happy one, like the Morris Minor's lever-arm front dampers being used as upper control arms with a range of motion that corresponds nicely to that of the torsion bars on the lower control arms. But this limits one to the effectiveness of the lever-arm dampers.

Given the above proviso - which is more of a design PITA than a real limitation - there is nothing wrong with torsion bars.