About to get back into my fenderless A roadster hiboy project with Model A frame and rear spring and a 3 inch kickup at rear. Am using a modern diff and going to weld on brackets for a reversed eye A spring directly over diff in stock location. Want to use early ford split bones forward to chassis side, to match front . Need some ideas how to locate top radius rods and panhard bar to not to be so visible. Guess I can tuck the top rods just inside the chassis, but what to do about the panhard bar ? Pics would help.
I am not sure what you are going for here. If you are using bones on the outside of the frame rails, you CANNOT use radius rods for top links. Your rear suspension will not move. Bones mount solidly to the axle, with no pivot. If you introduce any other pivoting links to the equation, you introduce bind. The only way that you can get around this is by creating a torque-arm, with a shackle mount at the forward-end. You would do best to make that arm as long as the bones, or as close as possible. With a properly set up Model A transverse spring, you do not need a panhard bar. In fact, it will likely induce more bind than anything else. You will need to do surgery on the floor to make this work.
Model 'A' spring with short shackles? Why a panhard bar? Why the 'A' spring when you want to lower? '26-'27 'T' spring is 'flatter', fits 'A' crossmember perfectly. If you are convinced that you need a panhard bar, simply 'lock' the shackle on one side. ("dead perch") Left side the shackle swings; right side a pair of 3" triangles replace the elliptical shackles, 2 points of triangle drilled for shackle bolts, the 'base' side lays right on the axle housing, gets stitch welded along base. Gimpy suggests the best solution for the 'torque tube' problem. ('upper bars')