Lifting the Bus

Lifting the Bus is almost a mandatory part of the bajafication process, it's also where things start to get a bit trickier and possibly more expensive depending on what you can do yourself.  I'll start with the back as it's the easy part, well relatively ;)

The Back

To lift the back of a Bus you basically follow the same procedure as lifting the back of a Baja Bug, because of this I won't go into a lot of detail instead I'll point you to an excellent description written by the Sandlizrd on his site the only thing I'll add is that on a bus one outer spline is about three inches of lift on unsagging torsion bars.  If you really want to get it spot on then it's described in the Haynes manual, although don't listen to the crap about keeping it standard!!!

You'll find that getting the back of a bus level from side to side is not an easy thing and that you may want to tweak the final ride height.  The easiest way to do this is to install adjustable spring plates.   Once you've lifted the back you can just turn the little allen key bolt to fine tune the adjustment.

Here's the adjuster above and to the left of the axle stand.  As you can see with the suspension installed in this position there is enough adjustment to lift it further although you won't know if it's enough until the weight of the bus is on the suspension again.  The only thing you need to be careful of here is tire clearance.  My tires run so close to the torsion arm I'd have to make careful measurements to make sure they didn't rub on the adjusters.

A lot of the Baja Bug guys don't like to run these things, they break easier and just aren't as strong as the non-adjustable type.  If your planning on getting plenty of air in the Bus then forget about them, if your not then I'll leave it up to you.  I think I'll leave them out on my Bus but it's more because I'm cheap than anything else ;)

Just out of interest this Bus is running a Porsche gearbox and a 4.3lt Chevy Vortec V-6 engine and can be found at Dave's V6 Camper site

The Front

The front is not really any harder than the back but you do have more options, three to be exact.

The first option is probably the easiest but not my favourite way of lifting a bus.  All you have to do is rip out the standard shocks and shove in a set of adjustable coilover shocks.  Wind them up as far as they'll go and your done, the Bus will be sitting on the bottom bump stops.

The problem with this is the torsion bars are no longer taking the weight of the bus, the shock towers and shocks are carrying most of it.  This puts a heap of stress on the shock towers and can cause them to split under the load.  This is not a good thing, in fact this is an 'Oh s#@t now what am I gonna do' sorta thing because it'll only happen when your running hard and you normally have to go back the way you came to get home.

The second option is probably the most common option and involves puting adjusters in the front torsion bar housing.

The picture above shows an adjuster in the centre of the bottom torsion bar housing tube.  You really need to put an adjuster in the top and bottom tubes otherwise you'll have a ton of trouble getting the steering knuckle back in between the torsion arms as one will point up, the unadjusted one, and one will point down, the adjusted one, and the force of those torsion bars is a huge force to battle with!!!

If you want the suspension to be stiffer you can put in four adjusters instead of two.  Put two in the bottom and two in the top and offset them from the centre the same amount.  This will have the effect of shortening the torsion bars and therefore increasing the torque required to twist them.  This is the way to go if you plan to really give your Bus a hard time offroad.

I won't go into detail on how to install the adjusters but if you use the type shown above there's no need to cut the housing, you just cut a slot in it and weld the adjuster to the housing.  This means you don't have to worry about misalignment or reducing the strength of the housing with poor welding.

This type of adjuster will give you about 4 inches of lift, but to make sure stick a trolley jack under the front of the Bus and basically lift away until the wheels almost come of the ground, then lower it about an inch to allow for some downward suspension travel and you've reached about as high as you can go with these.

The third option is really a sky's the limit sort thing and involves more welding.

What you do is make adaptor plates that go around the front torsion bar housing, this isn't easy to explain so checkout the picture below for some help.   The photo next to this shows the chassis rails being lowered instead, for more details on this go to the Bad Little Buggers site and checkout Members VW's and then Brads Bus, there's some great photos and good details.

What you need to do is weld plates around these holes and re-drill them further up which effectively drops the torsion bar housing down.  Be warned though, you really need to make sure everything lines up or you'll never get your front end back on again.  I've seen a few buses lifted like this including the blue one on the pictures page.  You also need to make sure the welding is really good, you don't want the whole front end just dropping off do you?

You can get about 4 inches of lift easily this way but it is possible to go up to 6 inches although the shock tower starts to get in the way a bit.  The real advantage with this type of lift is you don't lose any suspension travel, you will need to check steering arm angles and you may also need longer flexible brake lines so they can reach the wheels at full drop.  Other than that it's pretty straight forward.

The main problem with this is the front beam is no higher off the ground than before although the ability to fit tall tires does lift it a bit.

There is also a fourth option and that involves modifying the beam like this and then fitting adjusters as in option two, you can then get some really wild lift, like about 10 to12 inches.  You'll be able to fit pretty much any tire you want on the front up to about a 30"x9.5" maybe even a 31"x10.5" but that steering will be heavy and the unsprung weight will be massively increased puting extra load on bearings and suspension components.

The other problem you'll have is getting the back up high enough, it can be done but it involves even more work.  Check out the next topic to see how.