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This question may have been asked before but has anyone ever heard or known someone who has shortened a torque bar and tube on their bug?

Lots of narrowed torsion cars out there. Nobody shortens the torsion bars, instead they mix and match spring plates and torsion bars to get things either 3" or 5" narrower than stock, per side. The tube must be shortened to accomodate the narrowing though.

You can buy different stock per year lengths but shortening them is going to be a long, tedious machining (the inside and outside are different spline counts) problems as well as the right material the tempering.
What I have seen done is to get rid of the torsion housing and add pivots or radius rods to replace the spring plates then go to coil-over shocks.

Lee

Steve Carter from Australia, who has a Subaru STI (jdm version) powered Super Beetle shortened his torsion tubes to fit some giant Porsche gearbox (like a G50). He uses the shortest length torsion bars, IIRC. I believe they 30mm bars. He gets on here from time to time. Perhaps he'll chime in.

H2OSB

Ok thanks y'all I'll play around with it and c what i come up with.