Is Your Trucks Rake Too Extreme How to Level Torsion Bar Suspension For Free

Do you have torsion bars for your front suspension? I'm gonna show you how to level this truck out.

Hey, friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. So, you've probably watched a lot of our videos that we have recently coming out on this truck. Something that I noticed while it's sitting in my studio is it seems like it has a lot of rake, meaning that it's leaning very far forward just like this. It's good for a vehicle to have a little bit of rake. Generally, you wanna have more pressure on those front wheels while you're driving down the road. That's gonna help ensure that you stay stable, especially while you're steering or even stopping. But, if you have too much rake like this one right here, you could potentially skid out if you're driving in a slippery circumstance, such as may be snow or ice or something alike. Without having enough pressure on these rear wheels because there's too much rake leaning towards the front, there isn't going to be enough pressure holding that wheel to the ground to give you traction.

Now, why did I start off talking about rake in the beginning of this video or the slant of the vehicle itself? The reason for that is because that's gonna change when we make our adjustments to the front. There's a couple of things that you wanna think about before you start making adjustments though. If you like to tow things around with this, like maybe a nice heavy camper because you go away on the weekends, or maybe you're retired and you're constantly dragging around something heavy on the rear end, that's gonna weigh it down a little bit. When it weighs down, it might potentially even out the vehicle overall. So, you wanna be very careful because if you adjust the rate now, without having all that weight on it that's almost always on there, you could potentially have an issue where the rear is sagging lower than the front, and that's very unsafe.

But if you're the type of person that just likes to drive around in your pickup truck to go get ice creams or hang out with the family and there isn't very much weight that's sitting in the back of this, typically it's not gonna sag down. Maybe you're going out to the dump once in a while, you throw a little bit of trash in there, you might see it sag a little bit, but it's not gonna be as much as if you were towing or hauling something heavy in the rear.

If that's the case, generally you can get away with lifting up the front a little bit, making it look like it's almost even but still down a little bit in the front and you're gonna be good to go. It's gonna make it look a little bit better. In my opinion, it's something that a lot of people like to do. But like I said, this is a safety deal, you wanna make sure that if you're gonna be loading it up, you have it fully loaded, and you know exactly where the sag is gonna be in comparison to the front.

If at any time you find that your suspension is completely level or even sitting lower in the rear than in the front, you might find that you have issues when it comes to braking or even steering. When you go to steer, especially going around a corner, if you were to hit a bump of some sort, the front end might potentially lift up off the ground a little bit and you might lose some traction, which would be very unsafe. A couple of ways to see exactly how much rake you have is to either use a level like this coming across the bed, assuming that your bed is nice and straight like this one right here. You can tell that this is definitely sitting up much higher in the rear than it is in the front.

Like I said, it's common for it to sit a little bit lower in the front than it is in the rear, but this is an extreme case. Also, you can use a tape measure. Everybody's got one of these. If your tires are pretty much at the same treadwear, you can just pretty much go from the tire itself and up to where the wheel well is, you can take a measurement of that. Check on all four corners, write down those measurements and that will pretty much give you an idea of what your rakes are.

Now that we wrapped up talking about the rake of the vehicle, we're gonna talk about how to make our adjustments with those torsion bars. I wanna show you exactly what torsion bars are. But first of all, I wanna get the front wheels up off the ground so we can make our adjustments. For me personally, I have a lift, so all four wheels are gonna be leaving the grounds. But when you do this, make sure you do it from the frame so the suspension can hang. Now, what and where is your torsion bar? You're also probably gonna wanna know how to even adjust it.

Your torsion bar is gonna go from almost in the center of your vehicle all the way up to your lower control arm. What's the purpose of your torsion bar suspension is gonna essentially act as a shock absorber. So, while you're driving down the road, if you were to hit a bump underneath this wheel right here, it's not gonna feel like you're riding on two-by-fours inside the passenger compartment. It's also gonna work kind of like a spring, it's working under tension through this bar right here though. But what it's gonna do is it's gonna ensure that this wheel stays firmly on the ground, even if you do hit a bump. It's gonna go up a little bit, the torsion of the bar itself is gonna force it right back down to help keep this wheel safely on the ground.

Different types of vehicles are gonna have different types of front suspension. Some vehicles are gonna have torsion bars like this. On other vehicles, you might happen to find that you have coil springs up in the front right there, or even on older vehicles, you might even have some leaf springs that go across the front. Leaf springs are generally something that you're gonna see on the rear of most passenger trucks nowadays, but on the front, you're probably gonna see some coil springs or maybe even some torsion bars like this.

If you've got torsion bars like this, this is the video for you. The adjustment area is gonna be located behind the transfer case on most pickup trucks. You're gonna find a bolt that looks just like this right here. And if you were to look in between, you can tell that if I was to tighten this, it's gonna push up against the little lever that's on there which is attached to this torsion bar, which leads all the way to your front control arm. What you're probably gonna notice on this adjustment is it's completely de-adjusted, which essentially means this is pushed all the way down up against the adjustment area. And that, in turn, is gonna make it so we have the most amount of rake and the front is sitting lower than the rear.

The adjustments for the other side will be in the same area on the other side of the truck. So we know what a torsion bar is, what it's supposed to do, let's start making some adjustments. Now, typically, you're gonna wanna make sure that you have both sides of the front of the vehicle sitting at the same exact level. You definitely don't want one side sitting up higher than the other, that's gonna cause an issue while you're driving down the road. So, what you'd like to do is at least take that measurement ahead of time, know where you're at.

If for some reason, it seemed like you were sitting at, you know, 7 inches on one side and 7-1/4 on the other side, it's probably best to just go ahead and de-adjust this so this all the way down up against this and start from the beginning. That's gonna be the best so that way you know exactly how many turns to turn each of these. For me personally, the measurement was perfect, it's pretty much de-adjusted on both of these already. So, I already have a starting point. The next thing that we're gonna think about is how much we actually wanna bring the front up in comparison to the rear.

Now, in the rear on this, we're sitting at approximately 8 inches. On the front, we're sitting at approximately 7 inches. Now, I don't wanna have 8 inches front and rear. Like I told you, I like to have a little bit of the rake leaning down towards the front. So, I'm gonna try to get the front to approximately 7.5 inches. Now, when you're making adjustments on these, for each half return you make, it's gonna bring up the front of the truck approximately 1/8 of an inch. So, if I wanna go up 1/of an inch, that means I'm gonna go ahead and turn this to full rotations. One, two, let's do the same to the side. Now, we'll take it for a road test and we'll re-measure.

Okay. We're back in the studio, let's go and test it again real quick. Right in between the tire exactly where I was, looks like I'm sitting just below 7.5. You know what I wanna do right now? I'm just gonna try to bring it up a little bit more. I'll get it back on the lift, take the suspension so it's hanging again. And then I'm gonna try to give it one more crack and see if we can get this a little closer to where I wanna be.

Okay. Let's measure this one last time. Feels a little higher. Let's start right here. Oh, okay, just below 8. That looks pretty good to me. We'll come over here.

All right. So we're definitely a little higher in the rear than we are in the front, which is exactly what we want. One last thing we wanna do is go ahead and check that passenger side. You wanna make sure that you're sitting exactly level from the driver side to the passenger side. If the passenger side is a little bit higher, you're gonna be driving down the road feeling like this. That looks pretty good.

Okay, friends, I showed you how to charge those front torsion bars on your vehicle to help bring up the front a little bit. Just keep in mind if you're towing something, you don't necessarily wanna be sitting level without having anything on the back. If you're towing something often, you wanna be a little higher on the rear that way there if you have weight, it's gonna bring it down to an almost level position, but definitely not sitting lower in the rear.

I hope you liked the video, I hope you learned a little something. If you did and you wanna talk about it, leave it in the comment section below because I always love to hear from you. If you saw something in the video that you think somebody else might like or it might help them out a little bit, go ahead and share it with them. It'll mean everything to me. And if you liked the video or I loved the video, smash on the like button for me, it'll mean the world. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe, ring the bell that way there you, all of your friends can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.

Hey, friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. Of course, different vehicles are...vehicles. So, now what you came here for the adjustments. The adjustment generally. We know what a torsion bar is....