Ok panic on! Can't shift the beam at all, neither up nor down. Tried leverage, splitting the beams, attaching various brackets, ratchets and anything else in the garage but no joy. Ideas? Backup plan, if I cut off the bump arms how much further will the bus drop? How much does a bus go down on the adjusters.
How far it goes down depends on where the adjusters were fitted. I also ended up with 96 rated 175 tyres on the front with flipped spindles and they were pretty damn good. Just bite the bullet and cut off the stop arms. Either that or start again and lower with welded or flipped spindles.
Adjusters were fitted with the bottom of the slot in the original position. Scored around the inside of the adjuster and drilled out. The beam would not move to the full drop (within 2 or 3mm). My current worry is that if I cut the bump arms off it will drop further. I thought a shorter, firmer shock may stop me hitting the arch and/or butting against the torsion beam limits.
With the adjusters fitted with the bottom of the slot in the original position you can go down but not up. If the bump stops are preventing the suspension from compressing this will, or should, be a MOT failure. Bump stops must have adequate clearance – the regs don’t say how much ‘adequate’ is but touching isn’t acceptable – and the ride would be very, very hard. The original suspension travel from rest to bump stop is less than 3½”; you have removed all of that travel by raising the arms (to lower the bus) so the arms will be hard onto the bump stops. If you wanted to retain the bump stops you should have used drop spindles or restricted the lowering to something less extreme. To regain some suspension movement you need to cut off the bump stop horns – but then how will you stop the suspension bottoming out? You’ll need shorter dampers because you have reduced the distance between the damper mounts but stiffer dampers will only make the ride worse, they won’t stop the suspension bottoming out.
Tread from the dead.... How did this work out for the OP? Just doing my homework and the info here has been pretty good!
He was 'last seen' in here a month after his last post on the subject about cutting bits off. Might be overly cautious and reading too much into it, but I'm not sure I'd follow his advice - just in case!!
Annoyingly, one snippet I'd like more info on is @zedders opinion on why flipped spindles are more like 4.5" drop rather than 3.5" I'm just doing the maths and homework on Transporterhaus spindles, which is my preferred option (i think). As with the OP my consideration is a garage, but before that's built, I need to contend with a sloping driveway where too great a drop could be an issue!!
Cutting off the bump stops and fitting e.g. Gaz coilovers stops it rubbing on bumps if the bus is lowered by rotating torsion leaves in the tube with adjusters or cut'n'twist (cheap version involving plug welds instead of fitting adjuster). And they do pass MOT like that.
