In this episode I’ll tell you how I improved the road holding or handling of my Beetles with a few minor modifications to the car’s front and rear suspension, virtually for free!
Now before I kick off, let me throw in a quick disclaimer – just to cover myself, understand? I mean, what if you try to do what I did here and then decide to blame someone else (i.e. me) for your mistakes? That’s hardly fair, is it? I mean you’re a grown adult, right? So here’s my disclaimer: I will not accept any responsibility for anything at all resulting from anyone doing anything remotely similar to anything described within this article! Remember, I’m not telling anyone TOdo anything, I’m just telling you what I did! 
Let’s start with the Beetle’s front suspension:
The VW Beetle’s front suspension even in standard form is so strong that often it is the last part of the car to give any trouble. In fact it often outlives the rest of the car, to be re-used in desert racers, sand rails and so on. The early front suspension units had no sway resistance at all, but then they were designed to just tootle along at a top speed of 100km/h powered by a little 800cc engine. Together with skinny cross-ply tires and the idiosyncratic trailing arm rear suspension, it’s no wonder the car became known as the German Roller! All jokes aside – I knew somebody who rolled the same car twice on the same day on Port Elizabeth’s notorious “S-bend” (which no longer exists, sadly) although I have an idea alcohol could have been involved. That said, I’ve only ever come close to rolling a Beetle once in my entire driving life, and that was on a spirited pull away on brick paving – and that had nothing at all to do with alcohol! 
By the 1960’s, Beetle front suspensions came fitted with gas-strut steering dampers to try stabilize things a bit. They also had anti-sway bars, which brings me to the point of this article: Body lean is one of the things that affect your car’s handling and stability, and the faster you drive and take turns, the more the car tends to lean – and the more the lean affects your stability. Stability affects the level of control you have over the car – and a lack of stiffness to prevent the lean is what will make it easier for you to roll your bug – and we certainly don’t want that!
An anti-sway bar prevents the car from leaning excessively in turns at relatively moderate speeds. What’s an anti-sway bar you might wonder – well, it’s a shaped length of round steel that is attached to both sides of your front suspension so that it essentially joins them together in an elastic fashion – so that you still have independent front suspension going over bumps and through dips etc. – but when cornering, the bar helps to counter body roll. The stock standard item is about as thin as your pinkie finger, and under ordinary low speed driving, it’s perfectly adequate – but if you happen to be in a slight hurry i.e. being late for a meeting, or needing to rush to the E.R. or for whatever reason, the car starts to lean harder and cause under-steer. In tight high speed turns or during rough handling then, it soon becomes crystal clear that this stock bar is not enough.
The answer? If you have the dosh lying around, you could import some fancy American or UK custom part three times as thick – for literally several thousand Ronts – before import taxes help empty your bank account. We don’t want that either, do we? After all, we want to save money, remember? There are places you can get two stock original Beetle sway bars – the nearest scrap dealer or Beetle parts shop (or local Beetle guy with a garage full of old parts).
The aim of this part of the exercise is to add two more bars to the front suspension to increase and stiffen the resistance to body roll. Instead of the power of just one anti-sway bar, the car would have the power of three.
I jacked up the front end – the car’s front end that is – and removed the original clamps. There are four of them: two on each side, one large, the other small. I only needed a small hammer to knock the sliding lock off them. Then I placed the parts together on the floor to make refitting them easier without having to look for parts.
Then I removed the original bar from the suspension and removed the rubber sleeves from the ends – there wouldn’t be any room in there for those with three of the things crammed in there! I secured the three bars together with wire ties or tape, just to make things easier while I worked. Because all three of these items are the exact same size and shape, they would just stack on top of each other, but while that’s fine in the center of their span, it won’t do for the ends that have to fit into the clamps. To get around this problem, I clamped the center in two or three places along the center with suitably sized hose clamps. This will keep them together. The ends will also need the same treatment, and I placed a single hose clamp along the arm sections, in the space between where the two suspension clamps will hold it. As I tightened the hose clamps, they pulled the bars from a flat configuration into something more like a triangular cross-section. This is not so important along the center section, but it is on the two arm sections that need to fit inside the suspension clamps to secure them back to the front suspension trailing arms.
I clamped the lips of the clamps together with a vice grip first to hold them in place to slide the lock plates back on. I tapped them home with the hammer – and that was it – done!
The bulk of all three bars inside the clamps should be enough to fill the clamps sufficiently to eliminate any chance of slippage – but if in any doubt, I could always add extra support with U-bolts. It’s unwise to add U-bolts around the main lower suspension tube and center section of the bars because that would hamper the free movement of the entire front suspension and might also shift the bars forward out of their brackets as the suspension moves, which wouldn’t be good.
You get the idea, don’t you? I think that Looks better than just the one bar! Handles much better too – and at the fraction of the price of an imported custom part! Years ago, when I was younger and wilder, I did this exact same thing to one of my previous Beetles – a 1957 oval window model – and with this light modification, that car handled corners almost as well as a front wheel drive car! Although I don’t intend doing any racing with Dolly, it would be nice to not have “old car cornering” to blame for getting to places later than I’d like, so I’ll probably still add this to Dolly as well sometime in future!
Now we come to the rear suspension:
The rear suspension of the VW Beetle is what’s called a trailing arm independent rear suspension. It works very well, is strong and rugged, but there is an inherent Achilles heel in the design. The rear wheels tend to “jack” in turns – which mean that the inner rear wheel in a turn tends to drop lower than the outer, resulting in a “tucking-in” motion. This makes the car unstable in turns. What’s important to note here is that this doesn’t just happen when driving like a maniac; it tends to do this even at slow speeds – for example, Dolly my 1962 bug, makes me very wary for sharp corners, even when pulling away! This was one issue that VW received a number of complaints about during the years, and by the mid 1960s they installed a camber compensator (or “Z-bar”) for the rear suspension. Dolly, being an older model, didn’t come with the “Z-bar”, not that it matters much because while this did make some improvement in handling, it still didn’t solve the problem of rear wheels tucking in at moderately higher speeds on corners!
Years ago, I attempted to correct this by fitting an extra set of shock absorbers to the rear end of a Beetle – that is, TWOshock absorbers at each rear wheel – and although it certainly stiffened the rear suspension, the ride was absolutely dreadful! Not only was the car stable around corners as desired, but it was terribly rigid because the rear wheels didn’t react to the road at all! It was like having a solid rear axle, because the rear wheels didn’t move up or down fast enough to keep up with changes in the surface of the road! Every little bump in the road was transmitted through the car to the passengers! Since neither I nor my passengers enjoyed getting black eyes from our upper body appendages flailing and bouncing this way and that, I considered that attempt a failure!
Now bear in mind that unlike my previous Beetles, I’m not trying to turn Dolly into some kind of dragster! She’s a sweet lil’ old 1200cc Beetle and she’s a very original, special little car! What I would like, as a daily driver, is for her to just handle a bit better so that if I need to go somewhere a bit quicker – say, at the various speed limits around the city for example – then I wouldn’t want to worry about making it upright through the next turn in the road ahead! 
In the 1960’s and 70’s, when Beetles were being used in motor sports and drag racing (believe it or not!) and being hotted up for street racing, there were a lot of cool ideas that came about on how to stop the rear wheels of the bug from “tucking”. There were drop limit straps, which were essentially made from seatbelt strips, with mounting brackets on either end, designed to fit alongside the rear shock absorbers. These allowed the suspension to compress with bumps, but limited it from dropping lower than they needed to go. There were also things like “camber compensators” made from leaf springs which bolt under the drive shafts and to the gearbox. Unfortunately, while all these options can still be ordered off a couple of special interest websites, they cost many $$$! I couldn’t afford to import any, nor did I think I knew anyone who could make a set of the seatbelt limit straps for me, although I had enough seat belt material available! It’s the stitching you see, it’s done with a special sewing rig and thread. Also, the leaf spring solution looked expensive to make in materials alone. So what could I do? I did what I do with every problem… I pondered on it and turned a 3d graphic of the rear suspension around in my head, 
examining the issue from this side and that… and then I had an idea!
What I did was to make two identical brackets from ordinary flat bar steel. I cut two 45cm lengths, and essentially made two “U” shaped brackets to act as a sling underneath the trailing arm. At the top were two holes drilled to match an existing hole in the upper shock tower as shown in the photos! The bracket wouldn’t impair the trailing arm from compressing (moving upwards) but it would limit it from dropping lower than the bracket. (Why the hell didn’t VW think of this back in the day – this would’ve enormously improved the handling and safety of the Beetle in stock standard form from the word ‘go’!) Frankly I’m surprised I seem to be the only person who actually thought of this solution – I certainly haven’t seen any sign anyone else has! Maybe I should patent it? Hmmm… Nah. I’m not greedy. But you can call it the “Tina Bracket” if you like.
With the rear wheel off (I did one side at a time), I had the car on a jack, and took measurements. I also took note of the state of the rear suspension, which I have to admit was probably the nicest, neatest, most well-preserved, complete and original rear suspension I’ve ever seen on a working Beetle! When uncompressed (i.e. jacked off the floor) the trailing arm drops down to a limiting ledge just after the pivot (in the yellow circle in the next image).
This normally prevents the wheel from dropping even lower than that – and on a lot of older Beetles, this ledge has worn away – or the pivot retaining bolts have broken off, and the trailing arm simply goes past it! This was clearly not the case here, so I was already in good stead with Dolly! The bracket I was making would simply add to the the handling and safety of the car – and it would be lighter than the leaf spring item, and stronger than the seat belt item!
What was important about how I did this was to jack the car down with the lower shock mounting resting on a brick. What this did was to place the normal weight of the car on the rear suspension, so that it would compress to its normal level. I used that measurement so that once fitted, the bracket would keep the trailing arm at that level, even when the car was cornering.
Once I was through test-fitting and shaping the first bracket, and satisfied that it fitted properly, I made the second one to save time and to have a reference or template in the first bracket. While I was at it, I made a cardboard template – who says old pizza boxes don’t have their uses? The dimensions I used for the bar were: length 45cm. Width was 2cm. In the diagram below, the long flat rectangle is the shape of the bar flat before bending and shaping. “B” is the point where the bar is bent over sharply to form a “V”. This is visible in the side-profile beside it, where “A” is the inner surface that goes behind the shock tower. The longer straight side faces outwards and fits over the trailing arm.
Once all this was done, I fitted the first bracket, slipped in the bolt and a few oversize nuts in the middle as spacers, some washers and a split washer, and double nuts counter-tightened at the end. After refitting the wheel and lowering the car, I repeated the exercise on the other rear wheel.
Although I have yet to fit the front suspension mod I described in the first part of this article to Dolly in particular (I still need to find the two spare anti-sway bars) I have to tell you that the rear suspension mod has made a world of difference to her handling around even slow corners! I took Dolly for a short drive and wow, what a difference! She corners quickly with no discernable lean at modest speed. No noticeable ride roughness or degradation. So stable! If only I’d thought of this twenty years ago! In fact, how much more fun would Beetles have been if VW had thought of this DECADES ago when they were still making the best car in the world! Wow! In fact I could almost think I might not need to go to the trouble of fitting the extra anti-sway bars up front at all! …But, knowing me, I probably will anyway! 
It really is that simple – and cheap!
Pictures included – enjoy!
Have a DIY day!
Cheers! 
