Alfetta front end

[craig matthew]

Has anybody lowered their car,not sure how go about adjusting the torsion bars
Cheers

[NicS]

Hi Craig!
You’ll be pleased to hear that it doesn’t take long, about an hour or two. Neither is it any difficult. I did the same job last year after finding that my near side wish bone had been badly chipped, I have not the faintest idea how. Also my Alfetta always seemed to be a bit tail heavy and was a just about to rotate (see pics).

Regarding specialist tools you’ll need only a ball joint puller (available from Halfords for little cash). Take a measurement form the top of the tyre to the inside of the uppermost part of the wheel arch on both sides and note them down. You could as well measure the bottom of the wishbone to an even stretch of tarmac.
Jack the car and lower it securely onto a pair of mounts. DON’T have it resting on the jack only as you will have to get right underneath. Remove the front wheels and calipers. Don’t let them hang on their hoses. Tie them up and out of the way with cable ties or some strong welding wire. In order to create some work space I recommend to undo the upper joint from the upright first, then separate the outside joint of the lower wishbone form the upright with the puller. They might be tough ones and hard to undo. Most likely the will come off suddenly with big bang. No worries- perfectly normal. The wish bone is now pointing downwards in the torsion bar's ‘zero’ position with no load. Clean the torsion bar where its sprockets are engaging the wishbone and mark the position with a permanent marker pen (I used white for better visbility).
Loosen the two 19mm bolts that secure the wishbone to the chassis. You’ll notice that the torsion bars and wish bone will be starting to wobble as you undo the bolts. When pulling out the bolts do take care not to drop or lose the spacers living tucked away in between the wishbone and the chassis. They will have to be returned exactly where they were as the axle’s geometry is adjusted with these.
You should now be able to pull off the wishbone towards the front easily. If corroded give it a few persuasive knocks with a decent sized mallet! After having it taken off, clean, re-grease and put them back, this time offset one sprocket (or two if you really want to go low) in up direction from its original marked position. Re-assemble the lot in reverse order. You will possibly need the jack to get the ball mount back into the upright’s mounts.
There you go- job done.

Note that the rear end of the torsion bars has sprockets too, but a different number of. You could remove the rear as well and try different combinations. You might be in need of a special Alfa torsion bar puller tool for the rear bar mounts as these can be nastily corroded too.

Apart from wanting to lower the front of my vehicle so that it would be at horizontal level as originally intended I decided to remove all the tie-rods and wishbones left and right and replace all bushes with polyurethane ones.
The car had totally transformed driving characteristics, in particular on motorways. Feels like going on rails now. Sooo much fun!!!
Hope that helps! Fell free to comment.
Nightnight
Nic

Check the chip in the pictures!!
You’ll find the spacers as marked. Actually you might not. Mine had spacers only on the near side!

[ryloz alfa]

Very simple job 2 do , It took me an hour to lower my 1974 alfetta only thing I went insanely low , with the torsion bar at the front I went 2 spleens up , I can mail you picz if u want