What Makes Mopars Awesome

what makes small parts awesome so a couple of weeks ago we did that video why mopar suck about the the casting issues that came out but now we have to do the flip side what makes low parts awesome so i have to go back when i was a kid i was like yo 10 11 12. one of my neighbors i got a name named george and he ran a one car shop out of his house so while the other kids were like playing sports ball and doing all that stuff i was over in georgia's garage scraping gaskets and we did a lot of front end work tons of front end workers new york city staten island it was one continuous pothole so it tore the hell out of front ends and george was a gm guy and uh you know even at that age i was like i was totally in love with more parts well they wouldn't call them mo parts i would call them chrysler you know because mopar didn't really come around until like the 80s when people really started using it and common terminology so uh george hated chrysler products so we had another neighbor and uh she had a 70 satellite station wagon green wood grain big block you know three to three loaded right every option under the sun she was a solid 400 pounder and her old man was another solid 400 pounder so the front end of this thing after five or six years of bouncing around new york you know city streets was just on the ground so she walks over to georgia's one day and she says uh can you fix the front of my car so i can't drive it anymore the wheels are like this and you know it's just you hit a bump in it so george looking and says ah chrysler's junk it's got that torsion bar in there you got to rebuild the whole front end and i'm like hmm now at the time right again i was eat up with chrysler products i read everything i could read i studied i memorized it did everything and i was like i can fix that i can adjust the torsion bars because i know you can adjust the torsion bars so i grabbed the manual right and i uh chiltens right i found the procedure on how to do it and everything i said hey i can fix that it's not gonna cost anything it takes two minutes so she was like go ahead and try it so i grabbed a three-quarter inch you know socket and a ratchet i climbed underneath the front of the car and the front of the car was like down in the weeds and uh i start cranking on the torsion bars cranking making tight cranking cranking cranking and nothing's happening and i'm starting to be like oh geez right i'm cranking cranking cranking i go it's fine like i mean and i you know this was like yeah i go all the way up i get again i get this bolts without just about all the way buried and the cars only come up maybe a half an inch an inch right george was right it's junk what are you gonna do so later she goes she gets in the car she turns key starts it up starts to pull out of the parking space so that she's pulling out of the parking space the front end is coming up and up and up and up and like by the time she got halfway down the street it looked like a gasser because i didn't know about how to settle the things out you know but that was like that's when i realized here's the magic of mopar it's like you can adjust the height of the front end of this thing with just turning that bolt that proved george wrong right but there's like more to it than that okay when chrysler engineers designed the valiant because now all of these cars that we deal with from the classic or the mopar classic era 1960 to 1980s like that all of them evolved from the 1960 plymouth valiant uh they just for 1962 they just expanded everything in a couple inches in every dimension and it's where the b buddy came from and then the e-body came from that right so all of those cars descend from the 1960 valiant one of the features two of the features of the 1960 valiant was the torsion bar front suspension which chrysler had gone to in their regular cars in 1857 the torsion air suspension and the asymmetrical leaf spring so what they ended up with is the perfect i know the chrysler engineers didn't have drag racing in mind when they designed the valiant but as it turns out they created the perfect device for it so let's start at the back and we'll go back to the torsion marker because that's really the main feature at the back of a chrysler product you have the asymmetrical leaf spring what that means is that the axle is not centered in the leaf spring the axles in the first they've got a third of the spring here and then two-thirds back here and what that does is it turns the front of the the front spring segment into a traction bar ford and general motors leaf spring cars have the axle centered in the spring but chrysler moved it to the front and that's why ford and chrysler cars need that uh you know slap a bar or traction bars they need something to keep the front end from wrapping up with a spring from from going s-shaped when you're on it uh chrysler products no it's born with a traction bar so that's the one good part of it the other good part of it is the torsion bar see now the torsion bar for those of you guys who aren't familiar with it right the torsion bar is simply a spring but instead of being coiled you know like a regular coil spring it's left straight and it's it's twisted and that twist is what holds the front of the car up one of the main differences just driving regular cars one of the main differences is the torsion bar barely needs a shock absorber to be stable like for instance if you took the shock absorber completely out of a ford or a general as a coil spring car and you drove it down let's say a bumpy road the car would be going like this it's like undrivable right on a chrysler product you could take the shocks out of the car and it'll never do this it'll do this it'll do this but it won't just go like that so the torsion bar actually creates a very stable ride in the front of the car but from a hot running standpoint one of the beauties is is that you can adjust and jack weight using the torsion bars so let's say you want to drop the front of the car two inches let's come here come down here all you would do is get on these bolts right here this is the torsion bar adjusting bolt this is a anchor for the bolt and then at the top of this is a little finger and then the torsion bar which here can you can you see the torsion bar here the torsion bar is held in place with like a hex socket by loosening or tightening this bolt right here what you're doing is you're twisting the bar in that hex and that gives you ride height so if you want to let's say lower the car two inches all you would do is just loosen this the car would come down your lower limit is really the bump stop this piece right here where it contacts the frame that's as that's as low as you can go you can go as high as you want you can max this thing out it'll look like a gasser going down the road you'll probably get about seven or eight inches of total upward height uh instantly and infinitely adjustable now let's say you're dealing with a drag car okay one of the key features of this and something that so many guys just completely neglect one of the key features is this is that you can jack weight across the car at the hit when the car starts to accelerate two things happen the left front of the car tries to rise and that's a reaction to engine torque pulling it that way but the right rear corner of the car tries to rotate this way and it's the counter rotational force to the engine on the rear axle so basically the body of the car is trying to come down here but the axle is trying to go up in here what happens is this side gets light and this is the side that breaks traction first with the torsion bar front suspension you can jack weight this in this direction so you can tighten the driver's side more than the passenger side get it up a little bit and then that'll help counteract the forces trying to lift this tire off the ground it's infinitely adjustable and it's once you once you start getting used to like playing with it with the torsion bar settings you can adjust for all different track surfaces street surfaces all different weather conditions different tire types like you name it there's all it's it's an infinitely adjustable thing it's a kind of suspension chrysler products are born with the kind of suspension that general motors and ford guys spend thousands of dollars trying to replicate uh or at least maintain or attain those good qualities and unfortunately a lot of chrysler guys don't take advantage of they don't understand what's there so right away they'll go to a coil over front suspension they start putting these tubular k frames and all sorts of things in there and yeah you're saving yourself 15 or 20 pounds over the whole you know assembly that chrysler put there but you lose that simple easy adjustability these things are like foolproof so torsion bars have a bed wrap for two reasons first like george most mechanics are used to deal with coil spring front suspensions so to deal with anything having to do with the chrysler which is unorthodox it's out of their uh out of their wheelhouse usually the the most common thing to go bad with these over time is the lower control ambusher the lower control arm bushing is really what attaches the torsion bar to the lower control arm it's up in here it's the pivot point and when that goes bad the lower control arm will start to move around a bit the other thing that goes with the tour that gave torsion bars a bad name or bad rap is that they will break in fact the earliest ones 1957 1958 1960 there was an epidemic of broken torsion bars like there was like month-long waiting list for torsion bar replacements and the the very you know the very first you know one of these things and then they got the right metallurgy and the right heat treat and that problem went away occasionally you'll get one little snap but it's rare very rare the other thing is people are afraid to pull torsion bars in and out because they'll break if you nick them that nick becomes a stress riser and it'll snap at the stress riser point so i see guys create all kinds of crazy tools to get torsion bars in and out you know without doing any damage to them but i'll show you a trick you don't need any tools at all and there's zero chance of damaging the torsion bar come back under here all you do is take this nut off right here take this nut off okay at the back at the back of the torsion bar where it it goes into the cross remember here there's a little c-clip like a wire c-clip do you take that out okay i could probably take it out by finger but i'm not gonna bother with that right now you take that c-clip out you take you come back here you take this nut off and then you take a pinch bar a big screwdriver whatever you've got your hands on you unload the torsion bar loosen this bolt all the way and then take a big screwdriver and put it right between the lower control arm and the k frame and just give it a pry back if you pull this back about four inches the torsion rod just falls out the back and then when you're replacing the torsion bar you don't have to worry about nicking it or damaging it you just put the torsion rod back in through the you know through the for the cross member here and then just you could tap it in with a hammer you don't have to worry about nicking the ends of it or doing any damage to the ends of it that that's not where a stress riser will happen to cause the break so really simple no special tools involved now on top of that once you're accustomed to working with the torsion bars you can swap a set in and out of a car in like 20 minutes use all different diameter torsion bars uh there there's small increments like ten thousandths of an inch difference twenty thousands of an inch difference but like for instance on a drag car you would use like a six cylinder torsion bar you use the thinnest torsion bar you can find for the application because the six on the torsion bar has to be twisted more to maintain the height so when you leave the starting line that twist wants to thrust the front of the car up into the air and transfer the weight that will get you off the starting line if you're into handling that sort of thing you use an extremely thick torsion bar and that'll make the car ride flat very little up and down reaction the chrysler torsionbar suspension is just this feat of automotive engineering it's like one of the most understated underrated you know systems in the world of cars so that's it oh by the way they continued that up until 19 uh when they the uh the the f bodies the fmg bodies went with a transverse torsion bar set up so instead of the torsion bars running this way on the car they they run actually to the front and then criss-cross each other which is which is another system it's the same it's a just a different twist on the same thing so that's it that's the kind of stuff that makes mopar is awesome you know every manufacturer had great engines beautiful bodies crazy colors over the top options but only chrysler had the torsion bar front suspension and those asymmetrical leaf springs see you tomorrow

Channel: Uncle Tony's Garage

Views: 64,375

Rating: 4.9615817 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: vpomgHU1xF0

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021