Lowering the Bay!

This looks like a fun one. Call me when you want me to come over and supervise. Tinas is next.

Moving along slowly but surely!
I got a chance to press out the old ball joints yesterday. That went pretty well. Here is a shot of the swing arms after the old parts were pressed out. If you look closely at the old ball joint laying on the bottom of the box, you can see that I used my angle grinder to cut off a bit of the flange to expose a larger "landing" on the swing arm. This made it easier to position the arm on blocks in the bearing press. Lots easier than trying to hit that tiny little slot.



Next I used the lug bolt to pinch the adjuster to the beam for welding. I welded the adjuster in place and then used the lug nut to beat the center retainer back and forth about 50 more times. It is still moving with too much resistance. I am going to have to figure out how to free these up a bit more.


Here is a shot of the upper adjuster with the locking plate and a nut installed, you know, just to get an idea of the "look", once it's done. The parts are on order and should be here early next week. Nothing left to do but a bit of painting and to start devising a method of freeing up the retainers a bit. I am thinking valve grinding compound and a few hundred cycles might do the trick.

Nice job.
I am interested to hear how you like the before and after ride quality.

Nice work Thanks Dave T

Looking forward to seeing how this turns out. Dad needs to take note as well haha

Almost Done!

After freeing up the center retainers, I needed to come up with a center grub screw for the adjusters. The screws that come with the Beetle kit are not the correct size for the bus. The bus grub screws are 14mm, the same thread as the lug nuts on the bus wide five (early bay). I initially took the original grub screws and welded half of the screw provided in the adjuster kit to the end. This made a “hybrid” screw/bolt to mount the locking plate to.



After Steve and I set the bus on the floor for a test and both lock plates rotated out of position, I started thinking about how much force was on those ratchet teeth. I made a few very basic calculations: Lets say for fun that there is 1000 Lbs being supported by the front suspension. The force is evenly divided between the top and bottom beam (in theory) Lets say there is 500 Lbs force on each torsion spring. The swing arm is roughly a 12” lever arm. The locking plate is roughly 1.25” from the center of rotation. This means there is about 4800 Lbs of force those ratchets need to keep in position. (12” / 1.25” X 500) It’s not uncommon for a large railroad track to impart 2+G’s on the system. (4800 X 2 = 9,600Lbs!) I suddenly don’t feel confident in those peewny little welds I did! I was able to get it to support the weight, but I don’t trust it. I decided I had better get a real 14mm bolt and grind on the correct taper so I can really tighten those down nicely. I found these bolts at the local hardware store and went to my bench grinder to grind on the taper. I matched the taper of the original grub screws and I am starting to feel a bit better about this whole project.




I crawled back under to install the new grub screws and I noticed the teeth in the aluminum locking plate don’t line up with the teeth on the part attached to the beam. In fact, when the teeth on one end are seated, the teeth on the other end are sitting perfectly on top of the mating part! What is going on here? The Beetle didn’t fit like that. After doing a bit more engineering, I concluded that when the weld on portion (steel) of the adjuster was bent to mate with the beam (bigger diameter than the beetle), the portion of the plate with the teeth, when flattened slightly, actually compresses the weakest portion of the part; In this case, the side with the teeth. The exact same thing happens on the aluminum part, only they stretch apart because the teeth make the inside weaker than the outside. This stretching elongates the pitch on the aluminum part and compresses the teeth on the steel part. This accounts for the poor alignment. Seeing no alternative to brute force, I positioned the aluminum adjusters on their mating steel pieces and by using a big hammer, formed a new set of teeth that more closely match each other. This is a very crude approach. The robustness of this fix will be revealed in time.



I removed the shocks, and lowered the adjusters all the way down as far as they would travel. I noticed they would not go all the way to the end of their travel. The bump stops were in the way and there was no good way to work past this other than to cut them off. I didn’t want to do that, but I figured I can always weld them back on if this didn’t work out as well as I am hoping.





After a level test, I concluded the front was a bit too low after the adjusters were placed as far down as I could get them. They still would not go all the way to the end of their travel because the ball joint travel limits the throw of the swing arms. To work around this, I loosened the lower ball joints and separated them from the spindles. This allowed me to adjust the upper arm to a better position in the travel. I locked in the upper adjuster, used a pry bar to lift the upper arms enough to re-engage the lowers and tightened everything back up. I think I am right where I want to be with this adjustment now. I still need to adjust the camber, then the toe in. After this, it’s back together and time for a test ride. More to come.