rear torsion bars

[surfer]

Hi all , I'm hoping some one can shed some light on a problem I have with the rear torsion bars on my 1985 targa . I have just replaced all the suspension bushes front and rear with elephant racing standard rubber bushes and have set the rear torsion bars to 34 degrees as stated in the Bentley workshop manual but find the only way to achieve this is to move the adjustable plate totally up or totally down . I have tried indexing on the inner splines and the outer splines but there is to large a movement in degrees and when I put the car back down on its wheels the ride height is wrong ,front is suppose to be 108 mm between measurements A and B but I have about 140 and at the rear the center height of the torsion bar and wheel centre are the same but is suppose to be 16 mm and the car is sitting back at the original height at rear but higher at the front . The bars are probably 40 years old , do they twist ,sag , wear in the splines or is the manual wrong and has anyone replaced their torsion bars and spring plates with elephant racing bars .

Cheers 

 

[Silicon-Surfer]

I had the rear torsion bars out of my 80 SC recently to replace the trailing arm bushes and then I put them back I found that 34deg made the rear too high, so I played around with the indexing until I got the right height. From memory it was more like 30deg.

There are a different number of splines on the inner and outer ends of the bars, so by moving both ends they can be adjusted in increments of less than 1deg. After that you have the fine adjustment with the eccentric on the arm.

 

[Yeatesy]

It’s so much fun 🤪

I spent many hours on mine and I would have had the the suspension apart about 20 times before I got the car to sit where I wanted it.

[sus911]

Getting the height right is one thing but more important is the corner weights. That is if you want your car to handle as well as it can.

[surfer]

Hi  gents , thanks for the feed back and the photos , looks like a lot of people have gone down this road before and there seems to be no one answer and it just comes down to personal preference , ie ride heights , appearance , balance and the roads we are driving on . I have ordered new torsion bars and spring plates and will see how it all goes and once again thanks for the help .

Cheers