I'll try and condense as much of the history of this car and what I've done to it to key points but it's been my test bed for different ideas and methods. It's been driven very hard and was a daily driver for a good 6/7 years, pretty much till I got a garage and didn't mind going deeper into building it haha. Anyways back down memory lane.
This was the nicest bug I'd ever owned and I sure was a proud 21 year old! I went thru all the brakes, put the mystery motor that came with it in which ran surprisingly well(ended up being a 1300 sp) Man I thought I had the nicest car in town!
Suspension:
As far as the suspension goes of course I had to lower it down, which first consisted of a cut and turned beam with readjusted spring plates, then drop spindles. Eventually I went with a 4 inch narrowed scratch built beam with drop spindles and adjusters. Had drop plates in the rear then went to drop spring plates in the back from atomwerks.
I got tired of how stiff it was in the front and soft in the rear and ended up putting it on air ride. For the front I loosened the torsions and put air shocks in and the back I made my own bolt in air ride that I copied the design from limebug out of the uk and also raised the trans 2 inches at the bell housingand 1.5 at the nose cone. What a difference in ride quality that was and I learned a lot doing that fab work.
The suspension was great but with a few different upgrades I was doing to the car I needed more room above the trans. I had some more money coming in at this point in time when I started redoing the car again(after completing the dunebuggy a few years ago) and decided to buy a bolt in air ride kit from eva resto from the uk along with a 2in trans raise. It had its own problems that I sorted out (which if your wondering what they are I can touch on that later if ya want to know) which is now in the car. I have yet to drive with the new suspension setup but it's smaller packaging than what I built and lighter as well which is a plus.
Now as far as the trans raise, the first setup I built I used a bus nose cone and made a plate out of 1/4 plate to raise the nose of the trans(pro street with all the goodies from Wright gear box) bolting it to the factory mount location. I also had a bolt in mid mount. Noting that I drove the car really hard I remember finding the shifter getting harder to move and upon disassembly I found that the shifter bushing was up against the torsion housing. That was due to the factory nose cone mount being cracked and bent(probably from hard downshifting/compression slides into corners ect) so on this rebuild I used the eva resto 2 in raised cradle for the bell housing(that I had to modify) and for the front I got a universal nose cone mount for a rail buggy and modified and welded to the torsion housing.
I also made a custom mid mount to stiffen up the rear frame horn assembly (the upper air ride brackets act as a kafer bar) with some 1x2 square tubing and a tail shaft mount for a th350/th400 trans. In my mind it should work out well but we will see
I've got a few other custom suspension items I'll bring up a little later
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