The rear suspension on a car is most important, it is where most of the Travel is. As with the front I suggest KYB or the $30 adj. coil-overs. I went with the coil-overs because I have a swing axle and couldn’t be Raised up any higher but the coil-overs help raise it up about an inch or so. In this section I will be covering simple fixes to weekend warrior preperations.
>As you know Swing axle rear suspension is bad. Avoid getting a car with it. If you have it the rear wheels are probable at an angle. If they are lower the car until there straight. This will greatly improve the already unstable handling. Speaking about unstable my car slid out both on the street and off on the same day. On the street we were just going as fast as anyone would around a sharp turn, and the car did a 180 on to the other lane, thank god there weren’t any other cars. Off the road I was just going way to fast but not nearly as fast as everyone else.
>If you have IRS (independent rear suspension) you are set. You can rise it all you want and don’t have to worry about the wheels at any angle. Also IRS is much more stable.
>A good way to increases ground clearance and stiffness is to adj. the pre load on the tortion bars.
>Most of you probably have the rubber bumper stops on the rear suspension have always been told to take them off simply because they force the rebound on your car back causing the rear end to hop around. It sounds good in theory.
>A simple way to strengthen the rear end is to run a non-stop weald beam along the rear horns. They are just stop welded and could use some reinforcing. Also you could get a steel plate 5 inches long and about 1/8" thick to weld to the ends of the torsion bars to the floor pan inside the existing brace.
That is really all you have to do to get good performance and reliability out of the rear end of your car. If you have a roll cage and you think you need more rear travel you could buy longer shocks and mount them on the roll cage. Most people when doing this put 2 on the back per wheel and 1 on the front. You could use either KYB or Bilstein. The Bilstein are probable a better shock, but with performance comes price. Bilsteins are about $30 more than KYBs.unessary.
>Of course you could buy special torsion bars, spring plates and diagonal arms if you wanted to get into a lot of unessary work, but if you do really hard off-roading I wouldn’t call it unessary!
