Morris Minor Owners Club

After getting on with repairing the chassis legs the other day I messed up the bottom arms, and knocked the thicker one too far back off the end of the splines on the torsion bar. The weather was foul and I'd had enough, so I best guessed it back on and bolted everything up. The car was then about an inch higher than it had been that side, so when doing the other side I added a spline more height to even it out.

I wasn't convinced about the ride height afterwards, to me Minors always look like they're sitting too high anyway, so I thought I'd check the handy BoL. Which states the ride height is measured by finding the distance between the ground and the inner pivot, and the ground to the outer (bottom trunion) pivot. Well, my arms are both within a gnats of parallel to the ground, not the 4cm they apparently should be! This is after raising the suspension...

So just how high should it sit, and how do I measure it? Is the BoL correct (would seem to be in soft roader territory then), or is there another method?

measure from the bottom of the large round hole in the inner wing and to the centre of the thick arm where the ( trunninion pin ) should go, and this should be 17 inches when at reat

If it's too high it will be sitting on the 'rebound' stops - which is obviously not good! Arms parallel to the ground sounds good to me - that's pretty much how mine sits. What's the clearance from the front bump stops ?

The basic setting of my suspension was a trial and error thing (because everything was floating in mid-air) until I developed the following method - and got it right very fast after that:

1. Make sure your torsion bar is fixed at the crossmember and aligned with the eyebolt. A tilted eyebolt or a loose or non-aligned torsion bar will give flaky results.

2. set up some straight object just at the center of the eyebolt and

3. make sure it is reasonably level (hopefully your car is on level ground) - I managed to position the straightedge against the brake shield of the free-floating kingpin assy

4. Measure the vertical distance from the straightedge to the outer trunnion hole. The workshop manual says 14,5 cm or the equivalent in olde English measures. If it´s not correct, move the torsion bar "collar" backwards, choose another spline and measure. One of the splines is the right one. Once found - the rest is easy.

Like this:

Brilliant pic, thanks

So that's two methods to try when my enthusiasm fires up again

You should just be able to get your hand vertically between the front wheel arch and the top of the wheel.

You should just be able to get your hand vertically between the front wheel arch and the top of the wheel

Mmmm!! Not even horizontally!