Front suspension designs

Sitting here enjoying a nice head cold, and thinking about the options for front suspension designs, especially torsion bar designs. Were these exotic or unusual?

Transverse leafs are common, coil springs look too modern and busy, especially on a fenderless rod. I'm digging the clean look of torsion bars like on Marty's Spaulding Coupe build.

The only other build here I can think of with torsion bars is Racer-X's coupe.



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There's a thread on hot rod torsion bar suspensions.

Also, Chrysler used them for a few years, along with a couple other factories.
Sprint car guys have used them for many years.

Bout the only "exotic" suspensions left are rocker arm suspensions. Only exotic because of the design time and cost needed to make one that works well, that is strong enough to use on a driver car on the road vs. the race track (from where they originated).

Mike

 

Dragmaster used torsion bars on their cars.

 

Trouble w/ torsion bar is most everything , including the bar [bars] has to be custom made , if you don't have access to machine tools for all the parts & pieces & someone who will make the bars for a custom setup , the cost + the engineering involved would be cost prohibitive [although it would be a very clean setup !]

 

Thank goodness!!!
They were getting tossed left and right for independent set ups.
They still aren't that common out beyond the Hamb community.

 

Torsion bar suspension has been used on hot rods since the early fifties but yes, it is rare and unusual.

Kurtis race cars and sports cars used torsion bars since the 1940s. They may have inspired the few who built them for hot rods.



Tex Smith's XR6 used a VW beetle torsion bar front suspension. It won the prize at the Oakland Roadster Show as America's Most Beautiful Roadster in 1963.

 

Steve Moal is offering torsion bars in his builds.

 

Back when it looked like the availablity of Mustang II suspension components would soon not meet the demand, and before it occured to anyone to repro them, somebody offered a crossmember that anchored Mopar torsion bars. Might have been Gibbon. Needless to say, it wasn't a big seller and repro-MII were soon being offered.

 

Yes Dwight Bond at Gibbon offered it. And in his own words a few years ago "we could never make it work". Local guy here bought a crossmember at the Nats when it came out. We worked on that car a dozen or so years ago. Thats when I tracked down Dwight to research the setup. Still drives like crap.

 

Thanks Redo32, that black & chrome setup is very nice looking. I'm also partial to hairpins.

Tman, what is the problem with the Gibbon setup? Bars too stiff?


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The problem is that on most traditional hot rods there is only a couple inches of suspension travel and torsion bars can't hit a narrow enough window. Torsion bars do work quite well were they were meant to be used.

 

Here is one I did 40 years ago ( bottom 2 photos) using Morris Minor bars, hidden inside the rails. It rode and drove like a dream. Today with the vast availability of bars, arms, bushings and hardware like I am using on the Spalding roadster, it makes it a whole lot easier.

 

How did you select the parts back then, Marty? I'm curious what drove your design.


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If you have ever been around sprint cars and midgets you would know that there are more than enough readily available parts and the engineering is not that difficult or costly. Jokerr Fabrication has put torsion bars on a lot of recent builds including Dave Gray's Chemical City Coupe and Marty Bachand's 33 coupe.

Roo

 

Check out member: tmfcracing. An incredibly innovative car builder from Sweden. He builds a new roadster with torsion bar suspension now.

 

Almost all of the Dragsters in the 60's used a square single ' V W ' torsion bar that was made up from pcs of spring steel, held in the center with a bolt into the front cross member tube

Then each side could move on its own when the car bounced or twisted

Very simple and light

DND

 

I've seen under hung springs but I think if you did that you'd wind up with serious scrub line issues . Draw some wheels on there to scale and see what you get

 

Mostly, not enough room for upper control arms to go forward enough. The resultant negative caster is 'scary at any speed'!
Three F100s in a row...'Unalignable', if one wanted to keep the front tire in the wheel weel...

 

Availability of parts for sanitary torsion bar fronts:
In the '80s, Davis Motors (Rich & Sandy, both deceased now) was the 'Purveyor of Sprint car parts' in San Jose.
Lem Tolliver build no fewer than 6 chassis (tube frame to Deuce rails, and all in between)
using 3 bars, 4 bars, and 'resting arms' (where the extended links rested on pads on the axle; Said axle was located by a 3-bar 'wishbone' setup, and a Panhard.
Some VERY sophisticated (yet simple) stuff!

 

Not completely true. Oval track guys use torsion bar stuff all the time. Bars, arms and stops are plentiful.

 

Lem Tolliver, now there is a FABRICATOR !!!!!

 

At the 2014 Louisville Nats I saw an orange roadster with a strange no spring front end. I got down to look at it & the owners walked up and explained that it was a torsion bar front end. The owner said it was based on a sprint car's suspension. The car was from New Hampshire. I went back with my camera & the car was gone. I got his name & did a search & discovered his car was judged Builder's Choice Award at a 2013 Goodguys East Coast Nationals. His name is Doug Juonis. I was never able to get in touch with him for further details.

 

I used to have a '79 Toyota 2 WD pickup back in the '80s that had torsion bar front suspension. That thing truly handled like a sports car, and I often wondered whether anybody ever adapted the Toyota pickup suspension to anything else. The Toyota pickup frame is not too wide for the front portion to be grafted onto our old iron, and the track width is not too much to fit under the fenders, and the suspension is not too ugly to run on a fenderless car. I don't have the fabricating skills to try it myself, but wondered whether anybody ever tried it. Frame swaps are generally frowned upon on the HAMB, but the whole Toyota pickup frame might work under a '30s-early '50s pickup cab and bed, just take lots of measurements, measure twice and cut once,

 

Ideal for a car show or shopping centre "show pony" , or for somebody that has no concept of a good handling car.
On a cross leaf the roll centre is where the spring perch is.
This would raise the roll centre above the centre of gravity so any lateral acceleration would cause the car to lean into corners and unload the outside tyre.
The car will understeer badly.

Torsion bars can work successfully on hodrods but the biggest problem is lack of understanding the rating of them.
For a vehicle with a small amount of suspension travel, the arms need to be shortened to maintain a reasonable amount of twist [which stiffens them]
Then the torsion needs to be thinner or longer to soften the ride.

The problem with torsions on hotrods is the builder usually uses them to hide the appearance [eg: long arms and torsions hidden under the rails]

 

well, that's enough for me for one day!

 

I got under a Mercedes sprinter Van today.
Transverse leaf spring (big ass mono leaf) on control arms. Neat set up.

 

Don't be scart I like it when logic is added helps me weed out my stupid ideas

 

If you want different, check out the Hollywood Hotrods new build!

 

I put a Gibbon torsion bar front end on my 50 Stude pickup. They supplied a Ford F1 kit and I modified it as needed.
It was too soft at first and my donor car was a full size Fury. I also had alignment issues - my alignment guy kept working on the caster until we got it drivable, it was scary darty at highway speeds at first.
It sat right and rode nice n cushy but I never did get stiff enough bars to make it feel the way I wanted. That big ol' Mopar power steering box made building the fender well headers (BBC) a pain as well. Not a great torsion bar experience.
I almost tried them on my '27 T roadster but I went with angled quarter elliptics in front instead. That worked out great.

 

I have done this on the International I have been working on for myself. The frame is underslung spring ahead using a set of 48 bones a model A axle and spring. The ends of the bones will be heated and rotated to line up with the spring eyes. The problem you might run into is ground clearance, I used 2"x3" box tube and the bottom of the frame will be at the bottom of the rim.