removing front beam leaf springs ?? is it possible

Hi guys just throwing this out there but does anybody know if it is possible to remove the front leaf springs inside the beam all together ?? how do you stop the arms falling off, if so ??

the reason i am asking is becouse in the future i am looking at using rancho air shocks with an onboard compressor and it would be great to get rid of the leaf springs and have the hole front end resting on the shocks and have them move fully independent ( would also be good for coilover front shocks)


one thought i had that was another option was to remove the front end adjusters and rerplace them with a hollow tube to allow the leaf springs to move freely inside the tubes ( only problem with this option is that it still does not give full independent front wheel travel becouse as one wheel moves or bounces it will apply pressure to the other wheel also .

hope that all makes sense any ideas would be awsome

I've never thought about it before...

but as you say. there would be nothing to bolt the front suspension arms onto...

the easy solution would be to drill out the idents that hold the centre of the torsion bars
then there would be no pressure at the ends...
but the two sides are still connected...

if you have front torsion bar adjusters
just take the grub screws or bolts out and the torsion bars won't be attached at the centre...

then you can use coil overs and shocks..

torsion bars are very strong and used on many buggies..

cheers

Lee

http://community.webshots.com/user/vw68autobug

yeah i did think about those options , but they still dont give a full indepentent front end becouse one wheel will be affected by what the other front wheel is doin . they are good ideas and i may need to settle for that style of thing and just experiment with it a little

i have just found out from the samba that what is used is somethign called through rods ,, some sort of threaded rod with thick washers and lock nuts ,, this is a link to a pic

http://www.pacificcustoms.com/AC401030.html

talk to dave at custom he put them on a car already

oh true true cheers ( the twin bajas right ?? one was yellow ?)

just through it out there and tryign togather some info for the future

Here's some food for thought. The standard VW torsion bars are completely independant on each side.

The type 3's use one tube for the torsion bars (held on the middle) and the other tube as a sway bar (not held in the middle). By having a front end with no screws in the adjusters will effectively give you two sway bar tubes.

If you have try having torsion bars with nothing in the middle (like sway bars) the arms will still slop from side to side a little, squashing and breaking the arm seals. The normal torsion bar center anchor stops that little bit of side to side movement.

Like Wes said, they're fully independent anyway so what would you have to gain? Also, the Rancho adjustable shocks you mentioned are just that, shocks, you still need springs! What have you been smoking????

hmm i see i see , yes the shocks by them selves are just shocks but the rs9000xl series also have a spring kit available for them which i thought looked pretty good ( i should have been more specific lol) , thus neededing to remove the leaf springs so as not to have a really stiff front end . the main option atm is to use thru rods as i dont really want to scrap the idea of using coils over the shocks ,, but i guess we will see what happens might have to keep the adjusters in there and use just the shocks them selves ..

You can use the torsion bars in a low setting, and use coil over or air springs as a booster. But when you have adjusters there is little point.

If you go for coil overs or similar you will need to completely remake or significantly stiffen the shock towers. The shock towers are only designed to handle the shocks dampening loads (which they require gusseting to handle offroad abuse anyway), so the shock towers won't like handling the dampening and spring duties.

hmm i see i see ,, i did think about the stock shock towers and have already planned to remake the shocktowers .. work on the beam will hopfully start tomorrow .

after the advise given by you guys i am startrng to think its a better move to leave the torsions bars in place with the adjusterers and just go for the air shocks them selves with no outer spring. i will still be modifying the stock shock towers also though ,

cheers for the info and help guys