A website dedicated to the building of a VW based dune buggy and some other random stuff too.

Crazy Cam's Technical Bits... Ground Clearance

How to raise the suspension on your beetle, buggy, or death wagon.

Natural endowments.

The basic VW Beetle ground clearance is factory set to provide adequate clearance for road use. Many custom Beetles have lowered front suspension, this gives the car a desirable (?) appearance, and may improve handling.

But we don't want to do that !

What's the best position ?

What we require is more ground clearance, so that we can drive down rutted tracks or over rough terrain without grounding and getting stuck - this is more important for a VW based buggy than for a 4x4 since we only have two driving wheels. Fitting larger knobbly tyres will help raise the car by a couple of inches but I want more !

From behind...

The standard beetle rear suspension set up lends it self to adjustment very nicely.

The suspension is performed by torsion bars. These are splined at each end and can be rotated by a couple of splines in either direction. This will have the effect of either lowering or raising the car. To raise the back of the death wagon, all I have to do is rotate the torsion bars by an equal number of splines on each side, and that's it.

Getting it up at the front...

The front suspension is similar to the rear, except that the torsion bars are now made of leaves clamped together. These also run the width of the car, and not just to one side as per the rear. The leaves are held together by a clamp which is welded into the centre of each beam.

To adjust the ride height of the front it is necessary to cut out the centre clamps and weld in place adjustable clamps. These are inexpensive, and allow up to 15 degrees of adjustment.

To lower the front weld them in one way, to raise the front, weld them in up side down.

Another way to lower the front is to use dropped spindles, but we don't want to do that so they'll be no more about it here !

The Plan...

What I plan to do is to raise the rear suspension by a couple of inches, and leave the front as standard. This is because to maintain tax exemption et. al., I must use the original suspension. So I will. Depending upon how I get on off road this may or may not change in the future.