VW help -- 944 turbo trailing arms into a type-3/Ghia chassis

I'm trying to adapt 944 Turbo trailing arms into my Puma -- running into a problem with the shock mounts -- see the pics below. Things don't quite line up. Help and advice sought before I start cutting things up and making new upper mounts. One other thing -- I'm eliminating the torsion bars, so I'm replacing those with coilovers.

Thanks!

your E36 M3's all berkeleyed up.

helpful.........thanks

What year is your puma? They only used the Ghia chassis up until 72 then they switched to the Brasilia chassis. I'm not sure of the specs on the Brasilia chassis other than its "similar" to a beetle. Could be enough to account for the differences you are seeing.

As for how do you fix it, looks like the upper shock mount will need redesigned. I seem to recall that on a beetle, with proper reinforcement (lots of it) you can hang the shock to the outside of the mount like you are showing in your photo with the shock simulator. Finding some way to triangulate that would be even better. I had looked into doing something similar so I could mount large coil overs on the back of the Wartburg but I never got that far in the conversion.

Interesting.. If you were using a shock to mock this up couldn't you just turn the top eye of the shock until it lines up with the bolt hole? What I am seeing here is using a flat bar to approximate a shock...

The earlier steel arms from the 924 and early 944 might work better since the shock mounts are in a slightly different location and they still could net you the rear discs that you want (the steel arms are actually lighter than the cast aluminum).

I'd keep the torsion bars, since they keep the CoG lower and you can find decent sized bars from Off-road Super Beetle's for a reasonable price (See CIP1.com's Super Beetle Off-road suspension parts, the 28mm bars are about $150).

Otherwise, I agree that the upper mount needs to be moved/redesigned to solve the problem. Time to break out the angry tools and the welder!

JT -- Puma is a '77 GTE. And yeah, I'd believe this is based on Brasilia parts. It's wide like a Ghia but the rear corners are rounded not square like the Ghia. This was also a swing axle car -- converted to IRS.

Turboswede -- thanks muchly for your comments!!! That is exactly the fence that I'm sitting on. I've not been a fan of torsion bar suspensions, though that may need to change. Thought that coilovers would be easier to set ride height, etc. Wouldn't mind breaking out the heavier tools as I was already planning to put in a kafer bar to better tie/triangulate the rear.....it just might wind up being a little beefier than a standard off the shelf kafer bar from Mendeola or CSP.

I did some poking about the car last night -- I see that I can offset the trailing arms slightly outboard with a washer or two placed on the inboard side of the inner TA pivot. That nudges the whole TA outboard and gets me better alignment to the upper shock mount. Time to start assembling....

Thanks for the help guys!

This might help with proper torsion bar indexing by using maths!

http://944spec.org/944SPEC/technical-articles/42-torsion-bar-re-indexing

Here's some info on the available stock torsion bars used in the 924-944-968's:

http://944spec.org/944SPEC/technical-articles/61-suspension-history

and here are the 28mm torsion bars that CIP1.com sell:

http://www2.cip1.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=C12-6569-28

They are available in 26 and 27mm as well:

http://www2.cip1.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=C12-6569-26

http://www2.cip1.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=C12-6569-27

You can also cut the end of the torsion bar cover off and use a slide hammer threaded into the end of the torsion bar to pull them out and reindex them, that's an old racer trick to help speed that process up.

Wondering if the stock Puma bars are enough......car is only 1500# wet.

Thanks for the torsion bar re-indexing trick and the article on how to set torsion bars....maths are fun!! :-)

In reply to orphancars:

Could be. Hence why I posted the link to the other bars used in the cars stock since they might be better suited to the car. I think there is a way to calculate the resonant frequency for the wheels to help select spring rates.

Is it me or is there an angle to the shock mount surface on the 944 trailing arms that would put the top of the shock almost exactly where you want it. the piece of metal you have in there is strait up and down not at the angle of the mounting surface of the trailing arm.

What I am saying is get the angle of the lower mount of the shock correct and then see where it ends up up-top. I bet you will be a lot closer than you think.

thanks Dean -- yeah, you are correct -- there are a few subtleties in the mounting points where the shock eliminator doesn't quite work out so well. That's what I found out when I started moving the trailing arm around a bit last night -- a few washers shims the trailing arm out a bit and lines everything up a lot better....