Ladder Bar instal question

Hey
I am building a model a chassis with a Pete and Jakes or SoCal ladder bar and buggy Spring rear end. I want the car to be quite low, it has a 12" rear kick up.
Has anyone got any pics of a ladder bar set up in a low chassis? I am interested to see what height the front of the bars are mounted at.

I am thinking if I can get the brackets on the diff housing close to square with the diff housing face then it will work fine

Cheers Pete

 

Then it would seem your issue is that the top's of the ladder bar's will interfere with the bottom of your bed so to speak. Is this correct ? Also can the board get a better pic of the ladder bar's at the axle tube ?

 

I am not to worried about the bed floor, I will probably have to raise the floor in the mid section of the back of the cab a bit as well. Just looking to see what other guys have done in case there are any geometry issues.. The rear end brackets are not fixed yet

 

Ok then let's look at it differently then. I understand that you'd like to lower the front mounting point. There's 2 way's to do it. Lower the ladder bar brackets at the rear (new brackets) or alter the angle of the ladder bar with the adjuster's provided on the end's. This may involve a little rework of the lower tube so the link can be screwed in further because you do not want to over extend the reach of the upper link. (You hadn't posted in time. Sorry)

 

I think your setup looks fine, mount the front of the ladder bars to the cross member where they are at, the lower mount point on the rear of the ladder bars is above scrub line, may sure you have enough adjustment in the rear ladder bar mount points to get your pinion angle adjusted.

 

Since this isn't a drag car where the CL is critical it won't be an issue.

 

The ladder bars need to point up or be horizontal to be geometrically correct and give you antisquat with the corrct amount of pinion angle at ride height. Pointing them down will cause the car to squat under load which will in turn can cause the rear tyres to easily unload. The pinion will point down. The front pivot point needs to correspond horizontally with centreline of housing at ride height.
With antisquat built in and bars pointing up at the front up, the wheels have a tendency to turn the axle in the opposite direction. This motion causes the bars to push the car up.
With them pointing down the opposite occurs and the rear drops.
Race cars can have 1-2 degree down angle

 

You want those bars triangulated towards the center.
If you get the brackets and bars square to the diff housing the bars would be square too, yes?
That's known to cause issues

 

Nothing is welded in yet - all just sitting there while I figure it out. I have some four link knowledge as I have built and raced a couple of drag cars just not sure what I can get away with on this build. I flipped the ladder bars up side down and with bottom bar almost level and mounts square to diff face it looks pretty good to me - as per the top photo. I get what mgtstumpy is saying about anti squat etc. does the diff care which bar is level as long as one is?

 

It would make better sense to set your pinion angle so u-joints work correctly by rotating housing at the unwelded brackets. That way the end link's on the ladder bars can be set to have equal amounts of thread on the upper and lower link. That's if you can not raise the front mounts as high as you'd like to due to the cab's floor. This has been an issue on a 32 that I'm working on. When home won't allow. Something's gotta give.