Re: Torsion Ride Troubleshooting

Posted by HH56 On 2012/12/18 16:17:55

The tail lights do not have to be hooked up but there does have to be power on the pink wire to the brake light switch so it can power the light green wire to the control switch. Another question that should have been asked earlier is if the car is disassembled. Without weight of bumpers or fenders, the suspension is generally not able to compensate much and goes to limits.

Since it ran for 8 seconds one thing I would do is make sure the lever did not pass center on the compensator so the bars are now trying to drive around farther and running into the mechanism. There is a top view of the system showing the transverse bars in fig 21 in SM suspension section. Make sure your bars are on the sides shown -- passenger to rear of unit, drivers side to front. The bars going past center is a common result when limit switches fail or someone tries to bypass them. Look for anything else that could be putting a strain on the motor & make sure the bar part on the limit switch Tbar that gets touched by the bars is the later version and is slightly over 2" long. Early switches had the bar too short and didn't reliably work in time.

Assuming nothing is mechanically wrong causing a load then the other thing that can cause the fuse to blow is if the motor is being told to try & run both directions at once. This could happen if the control box is bad or if there is a short in the limit switch or the buss bars so it is trying to bring in both solenoids at once. Packard said the current draw on the motor is around 17 amps max but one thing they did for 56 was change the fuse from a 20 amp to a 30 amp. Nothing else was changed operationally so makes one wonder if the 20 amp fuse was marginal.

Out of curiosity, have you verified the wiring is correct per schematic and no one has miswired something.

Ross may have another idea but one way to test the control switch is to disconnect wires except the light green. Turn on the under dash switch and make sure there is power on the wire. NOTE: If you have the 55 switch it will have only 3 screw terminals on the outside . If your car had the 56 retrofit switch installed the 3 wires will be inside the the watertight enclosure as well as two extra double terminals. No extra wires but except for green, those present will be a different color than the schematic.

Disconnect the link coming from the torsion bar at the switch lever. You can now move the lever freely. There should be spring tension felt in both directions from center. Move the lever one direction against the tension and after 6-7 seconds you should hear one of the relays click. Move the lever back to center and somewhere in that travel the relay should drop out. Now move the other direction and after the time delay you should hear the other relay click. If you want you can check with a meter. The two now empty terminals should each short to ground --but only one at a time -- if the relays are working.