Disassembling the front beam

[davejohansen]

Any words of wisdom before I start to disassemble the front beam. Not sure if there is anything I need to pay attention to as I work. How much tension is on the arms when I loosen them from the torsion bars? Do I need to mark any reference points?

I took out the rear swing plates last night, do the rear torsion bars just press out of the spline on the swing plates? Any special storage conditions for the rear bars?

I know so many questions.....

Dave

[chadm]

Dave, if anything needed indexing it was the rear spring plates before you pulled them off their splines. You could also have put a protractor on the spring plate when it's off the perch, measure the angle (providing the bus is level to start with) to give you a better chance of putting it back together once it's apart. The rear torsion bars are splined on the inside too, they should slide out relatively easy. The front trailing arms are less complicated, they only fit on one way due to the shape of the torsion bar stack. I found the tricky part was getting the top trailing arm back on without pushing the leaves out the other side. It's not a big deal though, and because you know there is a bit of tension on the arms, you'll work safely. I suspect it's easier to take the trailing arms off / put on the beam when it's still attached to the bus, one less thing to hold onto plus you can use a floor jack to help manouver the arms into place. I don't remember what kind of bus you're fixing, but if it has a ball joint front end then you could index the top ball joint adjuster (camber) prior to taking it apart. Ideally, the "notch" in the adjuster will point forward anyway. If it's link pins, then lets hope they're not worn out!

Chad.

[davejohansen]

Thanks for the info Chad

The rear torsion are still attached to the swing arms. There was not much tension on those, once I slid them out slightly they settled about an 1/8" inch lower. Since I'm changing swing plates to straight axle, I didn't think marking the original ones was important. I have a 64 standard bus with kingpins so yes I'm hoping they're in not to bad of shape.

Dave

[ken]

the front end comes apart very easy. Just a big greasy mess....

I've almost never had a bus/truck with good original kingpins. The only ones that were useable were in the 26,000 orig mile Single cab I dragged home 10 years ago, from Swiftcurrent (Sarah).

I think the reason that they are all worn is that the service interval is something like 3000 miles for greasing the front end..... How many people do you think actually did this after the frist visit to the dealership.... Probably not too many.

Don't worry, when you get the dropped spindles, they come with redone kingpins, and they are pretty reasonable these days. New linkpins are under a $100 and with a few little things (tie rods, centre pin, and draglink) You've got a whole new front end! When you are using dropped spindles, you must change your tie rods anyway (different outer ends, and they both must adjust) so no biggie.