I have a customer who wants to do a custom build on his hardbody pickup, and was mentioning issues about his torsion bars in relation to it's unnatural bounciness. New KYB's have already been installed a few days ago.

He is interested in a coilover conversion, but I wanted to know about the torsion bar issue...

Jimmy

 

Well, I suppose any metal is prone to cyclic fatige. A coil spring is a spring in torsion as well, just wound in a coil shape. So, if you can imagine a spring going bad, a torsion bar can do the same.

Nissan guys do a thing called reindexing torsion bars for this reason. They sag over time, and you just reindex them in order to get some free lift.

 

The customer wants to do a mid-travel suspension setup for some super mild desert running (he has an ls7 in his hardbody :D) and doesn't want to go long travel, so I hhad to talk him out of keeping his torsion bar setup.

thanks D!

 

Yup just like every other suspension parts, they go bad over time...

 

Unless they are cycled past the point of elasticity they should almost never lose their strength. I have seen early 60s Porsches on the stock torsion bars. Steel has a pretty much infinite fatigue life if you stay below a certain point.

 

Truth. Design the part to never see a load past its fatigue limit, and you should be good to go.

 

Which is basically saying that running them at high speeds through the desert with its inconsistent travel (not a flat road course like what porsches run on) will wear out the torsion bars.

I'm not going to redesign the torsion bar system. Coilovers is just way infinitely easier.

 

same with S-10s. you can get close to 2 inches of lift at the expense of ball joint wear

 

does anyone know if maybe a retemper process is achievable or doable I know that LS7 is a light power plant but ive seen the heavy V8s in hard bodies as well

 

Eh, I think that maybe a coilover conversion is a simpler ordeal.

....and the LS7 weighs almost as much as the stock motor

 

yea gotta love aluminum engines I know when we built a dakar replica 911 we had to send bars out for treatment to handle lift this was the OG i cant find any pics of the one we did