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Bay St. Louis - Mississippi Gulf Coast


Ctgriffi

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Our big trip of the year was 8 days, mostly on the MS Gulf Coast. We broke it up into two days of driving down, two days back up, which kept each drive-day to a bearable 300 miles or so. Camped each way at Hernando Point, an excellent National Park campground with many full hook-up sites, located on Lake Arkabutla. Rented a cozy pet-friendly house near the coast while we were in BSL, like we've done in the past. Weather was not awesome, due to tons of rain and very high humidity, but not completely unexpected in those parts. 😅

 

The Warrior ran great and averaged just a hair over 13mpg, which is as good as I've learned to expect. Always nice to have a vehicle that can maneuver around small towns safely and easily on trips like these! On the downside, there are some roads that still just hammer the front end with a vengeance (looking at you, Arkansas!), despite my rebuilding/replacing most of those components. I'm still considering swapping out the 30 year-old torsion bars for new, but am on the fence a bit due to cost/benefit concerns (anybody done that yet with the sway-a-way® option and have a good report?).

 

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Edited by Ctgriffi
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Decided to take a look at the Warrior's front end, post-trip, and sure enough the t-bars had sagged a bit since my big front end repair project, almost two years back.

 

So, according to the service manual, this year and chassis model is supposed to measure ~10.3" from ground to center of lower control arm's main bolt (got to make sure your vehicle is level and tires are all at correct pressures to get a good read), and I was seeing about 9.5" for that initial measurement. This doesn't sound like a huge difference, but it can be an issue because there's not much room between the lower bump stops and the frame, even when the t-bars are dead-on correct. If you lose that small amount of clearance, your bump stops will be sitting directly against the frame, and your suspension travel will go to basically nil (my driver's side had gotten to that point).

 

My aftermarket bump stops may also be contributing to the problem because they're close to stock height, but not exact and are beefier than the the original bump stops. I may trim a smidge off the height of those, to give me a bit more travel, although I was able to adjust my bars to spec (see below) and should have some decent vertical travel now.

 

Measured After Adjustment:

 

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Edited by Ctgriffi
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I've tried ordering from swayaway.com and they appear to be the best source for our rigs. My order has been on backorder since June 1 of this year. I know of no other options for us including stock replacements. I will let you know if I get mine sent to me. 5 months and waiting patiently.

 

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33 minutes ago, lansisco said:

I've tried ordering from swayaway.com and they appear to be the best source for our rigs. My order has been on backorder since June 1 of this year. I know of no other options for us including stock replacements. I will let you know if I get mine sent to me. 5 months and waiting patiently.

 

 

Yeah, most recently, Brian at sway-a-way mentioned, "...shipping by end of November." Would love to hear how that turns out for you though, if/when you get them installed!

 

(And, in case anybody's interested in this random fact: I measured my stock bars at 35-3/16" long by 25mm diameter.)

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  • 3 months later...

My Swayaway.com torsion bars arrived! I've installed them and I'm thrilled with the results. I was sitting on my bump stops and driving around with the front suspension fully compressed. I've yet to be able to drive my rig since there's plenty of snow here, but I can see that there has been a huge increase in height. Now my bump stops are 2/3 from the lower bushing, and 1/3 from the upper bushing. I'll measure the control arm bolt height when I get back out to the garage. 

The job of changing the torsion bars was a mixed bag of easy and difficult steps. Once I had the front suspension in the air I used a grinder to cut the jam nut off of each side so that I could remove the nuts that keep the torsion bar adjustment bolt in place. That meant ordering a new set from yotamasters.com for about $36 including shipping. I've read a bunch of posts that indicate the bolts get ruined in the process, so I just cut to the chase literally. Once I had the bolt in the rear removed it was pretty basic stuff to remove and reassemble the torsion bars and the accompanying hardware. This is a major improvement to my rig!

 

 

Edited by lansisco
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Ordered June 1, 2021. Arrived Feb 5 2022.

I called the office of Swayaway.com every other week for months. I spoke to the owner a few times and I was really patient with him. He told me because I was patient I'd get mine as soon as he had them in his hands.

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