Help Please! Sagging Front end, can't adjust Ride Height at all.
Oaaaaaky lol
That is a whole lot of talking points.
By assembling the steering knuckle with no bump stop the maximum downward working angle of the LCA can be eatablished.
From there you can figure out if the bars slide in at maximum suspension travel. It's a drag car so upward suspension travel is of importance.
Five of our cars are set up this way. Same old combo - Tubular UCA, adjustable strut rod, poly LCA bushings + greasable pins, good shocks.
Interesting to hear other perspectives on something like this.
You asked for the reasoning, I gave it to you. Not my fault there's a lot of reasons to do it differently than what you've described.
Heck, I even forgot one. I've found that most of the time I'm removing the torsion bars I'm dropping the LCA's off the spindles for another reason already. So, why hook them back up to slide the bars back in and have to remove the upper bump stop (which never has to be removed for anything else) when you can just install the bars first and not touch the bump stops?
As for determining when the torsion bars become unloaded, that's easier to do with the torsion bars installed and the torsion bar adjusting bolts loose. You can determine exactly the point where the adjusters unload, which is the important part for setting your bump stop height if you're running aftermarket control arms, torsion bars, or have altered the ride height. The point at which the adjuster unloads and the bar slides out might not necessarily be the same exact spot, and the adjuster is more important out on the street because if the adjuster comes off the lever it may not reseat in the correct spot when the suspension loads again.
Drag racing is its own special thing, drag race geometry is really easy because all you care about is launch. And all the small torsion bars used have the same hex offset (the factory offset), so there's not much variability there. When you start running larger aftermarket bars for handling the hex offset varies with the size of the bar, and you actually care about camber gain curves, roll centers, etc, etc so modifying the ride height and setting the bump stops up around the new suspension travel is paramount. Because the larger torsion bars don't twist as much, you really have to pay attention to where the adjusters unload because the range of travel where the bars are loaded is much smaller than on a lighter bar that twists a lot.
To add, I seem to remember there being an aftermarket torsion bar that was manufactured with the wrong “clock” that would cause this for some people.
That was PST’s 1.03 bars and was fixed years ago.
I remember because I was waiting for the fixed bars before I ordered mine.
The PST 1.03's originally had a zero offset on the hex ends. It's not really "wrong", but a bar of that size with zero offset doesn't allow the car to be set at factory ride height. It worked for people that were lowering their car an inch or more, but those that wanted to maintain the factory ride height couldn't do it so PST changed the offset on the bars.
I don't recall what PST changed the offset to, I know the factory A-body bars have a 30° hex offset built in. Meanwhile, the 1.12" Firm Feel torsion bars I have in my car only have a 7° offset, and their 1.18" bars are 0°.