Raising Ride Height With Adjustable Beam??

All,

I've run my Chesil for 750 miles, with the adjustable front beam set to it's lowest to get the car looking right. Last week, I decided that I was fed up with the bone breaking ride and decided to put drop spindles on, so that I could put some height back in the beam, to save both my front shocks and my back!

Today, I fitted the CB drop spindles and set about raising the beam.

The beam is a CB PUMA style one, with the adjusters top & bottom on a toothed slide. I followed CB's advice and tried to adjust the front end as follows:

1. With the car on axle stands, removed the front shocks.
2. Loosened the beam's adjuster bolts.
3. Pushed down on each side's trailing arms.

Unfortunately, the adjusters only moved less than 1/4 of the way up their slots!! I tried pulling the trailing arms down as hard as I could, but I just couldn't get them to move that far. With the car back together, on it's drop spindles, it's now too low to drive, as the front wheels can hardly turn without hitting the bodywork.

QUESTION:

How on earth to you raise these adjustable front beams from their lowered position??? Any help would be gratefully received.

Mark

I've run into that same situation.
There's several ways to do it. You can loosen the grub screw, put a pipe on the extended threaded screw,then try to mussle it up enough.
You can try several deviations on that theme. All of them are scarey at best.
the best way (least stress on the adjusters and car)is to get your pickle fork out and separate the ball joint from top or bottom of the trailing arm. Do the same on the other side separating at the same top or bottom to match the first side.
Now the torsion arms aren't related to each other and you should be able to loosen the grub screws/pinch bolts or whatever you have to anchor the adjuster in the beam. Now that the torsion bars aren't anchored or tied to the torsion bars in other tube, you should be able to rotate it with ease.
If this is a link pin beam. The same proceedure applies except you just remove the steering knucklels to separate the torsion arms from each other.

If you look around magazines for beam adjusters, you may run across pictures the OLD Style ones that were first used. They had a lead screw that tied the anchor point (that pivits) to the anchor point (stationary) on the other tube. The lead screw went through a threaded end on one anchor point and through a hole in a lug that let the lead screw just pivit there. On these oldies you could just loosen everything up and crank the lead screw up or down to pivit the adjustable tube to the desired ride height.

Greg B

Thanks very much for the tip - it's not a problem to take the top spindle to arm ball join out, so I'll give that a shot later. What you're saying about moving on arm at a time makes a lot of sense and halves the resistance the car us putting up!

I'll let you know how I get on....

Mark